


What Never Was Can Never Become

by JayBarou



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gerry meets Michael and is not as scared as the distortion thinks he should be, I finally figured out why they didn't feel quite like friends nor like most ships QPR, Michael shelley was never human in the first place AU, Other, Queerplatonic relationship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2021-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:54:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 26,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24371632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JayBarou/pseuds/JayBarou
Summary: The Spiral doesn't have a plan, but it creates Michael.The Spiral doesn't know how to do a ritual, but Sannikova stands.The Spiral doesn't understand why its ritual fails, when it shouldn't have.Gerry doesn't bring answers.
Relationships: Gerard Keay & Michael | The Distortion, Gerard Keay/Michael | The Distortion
Comments: 103
Kudos: 295





	1. Before

The Distortion had a plan. No, that was wrong. The distortion had a deck of wild cards spread all over the board, hoping one of them would be checkmate, or a sudden bingo. But it had been observing other attempts at rituals, and trying one of those sounded like fun, so it set a few pieces in motion. It had seen the others taking humans to make them an extension of their power. It unravelled a little just thinking about it; having an identity sounded just awful. It respected very much the Buried for choosing to exist just as that pine box. It was about that time when the heart of the distortion took the form of a door, probably. Or maybe when it realized it was a door.

There were some merits to having _an_ identity in the world, it just disliked any part of it being real and vulnerable.

It let the idea bounce around in its mind. There could be an identity made of lies alone, it only needed to turn truths into lies somehow. It kept bouncing it around.

Bouncing from the little boy whose face had contorted so funnily when his friend had fallen prey to madness.

Bouncing to another child it had stalked and marked with lighting. Mike? That was a name. Michael? That was a better name.

It needed more names. And since this thing percolating was made of parts, the first name to come to mind belonged to one of the End’s humans: Shelley.

The Spiral thought of what a human needed to be a being. A face, names, what else... time? What time should this lie have? 975 sounded somewhat right, so it must have been wrong. It was fairly certain 91 was a time a human could have. 91 time. Or 19? Did the order matter? No, it didn’t, not to the Spiral.

And with that settled, Michael Shelley walked the streets of London; a full-fledged lie amongst unsuspecting humans. The Stranger had it all wrong, poor fool; being a lie was much more entertaining than being unknown!

The Distortion flexed its new and very useful muscle with little effort. If anything, it was like a hand, grabbing things to be broken. Michael was not its own thing, at all, but the little cluster of lies had a kind of ugly cohesion to how it fit together. Ugly but useful. And Michael knew what to do. People seemed to be eager to talk to the part of it that was Michael. They followed him through doors and alleys. The Distortion was very interested in that development. A fractal-painted vase hardly ever attracted people with such ease.

“Don’t... don’t we know each other from that...? Oh, but I’m sure you don’t remember me...” Michael would throw a little lie, and a little doubt in the voice, and people were hooked. Some just curious to know how the encounter unfolded, others simply thought Michael was naïf and easy to exploit. Both kinds of people saw the puppet and not the mouth as it swallowed them.

And then the Distortion had set him, its puppet, lose in the Archives. Why?

It had no idea. It just happened!

The Institute was a convenient place to leave Michael for the Distortion. He was useful, but he wasn’t exactly a ritual, was he? But Gertrude had a connection with rituals, someone had said it, and she was in the archives. Then again, maybe it was because Michael liked Gertrude; she was a good liar. So when she lied to him about being a fragile old woman, he lied back about being a kind assistant... and human, he lied about that too.

Some days Michael walked into the archives and he thought: Maybe they were friends? Friends lied to each other all the time. In fact, everyone at the Archives lied to him. That made him feel right at home. It was also entertaining: he got used to creating a little chaos at the institute but never being caught, because who would suspect sweet, innocent Michael? His doings ranged from switching all the blue pens with red ink to leaving web statements in plain sight to foster paranoia. The Web had not been pleased with that one, said it tarnished their reputation. 

Michael also liberated things of the Spiral from Storage when the Eye and its pupils were blinking. He hadn’t been ordered to do it; it was more natural, almost instinctual. He stole this book or that fractal-patterned mug and gave it away somewhere else. Maybe it was a kind of kinship what he felt towards those artefacts; he had been unfortunately bound to the Institute since the Distortion left him there, so setting those ones free was just liberating a bit of himself in some way.

It wasn’t terrible, all in all. He spent many amusing evenings seeing how the staff tried to work out the problem of a Leitner or a hard statement, and he would add to the confusion, by changing a number or a name, and on slow days he brought in confused statement-givers, fresh from the halls, and those wasted everyone’s time. He also scared all those who were trying so hard to keep him in the dark by making a remark that hit too close home for their comfort. They then bent backwards to make him unaware again. They didn't really know it, but they were helping a lot to perfect Michael's own lies. 

But mostly, he bid his time. The Spiral would call sooner or later.

The Spiral had not stayed still and had not kept a not-eye-Eye on its Michael; it had been sending all kinds of things into the world and some even came back sometimes. It had lost some time creating things for chaos when it realized it had been sending them to barren dimensions. Wasted effort, really, but keeping track of time and space was already hard enough. From then on, it had been working on a single dimension, and things had been going well enough. Humans kept making easier ways to break their own minds, pushing at the edge of too-much daily and then pushing in the opposite direction. It was a distraction because it hadn't advanced at all in the direction of its ritual, too many things to keep track of. 

It wasn't until it tried to let go of all its parts that it found a ritual. It tried to call all of its parts, not call together, not even call them closer because _space_ wasn’t a thing that wasn’t fixed, but not for the Spiral, so no. It had just... _been_ in its entirety, and it had felt it. The sudden joy of Becoming. It had only lasted for a second, but it was there! It was its ritual, and it didn’t know how it had done it! It was marvellous.

There had to be a way to make it permanent. Maybe there was merit to the idea of a single space, but only if it was _not_ a place that was. The Distortion had a lot of work to do during the following several years, or minutes, who knew. It didn’t; Michael would know. Michael was good at keeping track of the little lies humans told themselves, like time.

And by the time the Distortion had built Zemlya Sannikova, there were very few pieces still away from it.

Gertrude Robinson was preparing to bring one of them. The one it had left inadvertently stuck at the Archives. Who knew how difficult it would have been to retrieve Michael? Very considerate of her; if she hadn't taken Michael, the Spiral didn't know if it would have been able to overpower the Eye. Probably, but the Spiral wasn't in the business of knowing. 

The Archivist, of course, wasn't in the business of knowing at the moment either. Gertrude thought she was fooling Michael, and she was going to take him to something like home. Michael would almost think that they were friends if he didn’t know better lies than hers. They were only fellow deceivers, and their game was not quite as entertaining when Gertrude wasn't aware she was playing.

The Distortion didn’t understand what game Michael was supposed to be playing with Gertrude. Games had rules. Rules didn’t make sense. The Distortion discovered it couldn’t understand the way Michael thought. Michael thought rules could be bent and broken, and that was a different... facet of the deceit. The Distortion was surprised at how Michael had developed something, somewhat, without input. It was like chaos, and it was pleasing.

Michael was considering his link to the Distortion when he approached the Institute. Gertrude was waiting outside, under an umbrella, and there was a young man making brusque gestures at her.

“I know where the book is _now._ I don’t know where it will be when you come back! _If_ you come back, granny.”

“Then I suggest you go to look for it now. Unless you need this granny to take your hand.”

The young man noticed him approaching first and promptly shut up. Gertrude looked behind her and smiled, almost sweetly.

“Oh, there you are! You came early too. Good, good, we can leave then. Goodbye, Gerard.”

The young man, Gerard, was not paying an iota of attention to Gertrude. He was starring at Michael intently, with a little frown and frozen muscles. Michael could feel the delicious confusion rising, but he didn’t know why. He looked around, and when he made sure he must be the source of Gerard’s confusion he waved shyly and with a smile, the way he had learnt to do. Gerard’s frown deepened, his hand went discretely to his side, under his long, black coat.

“Michael!”

Gertrude called again and the strange moment was broken. Michael trotted to her side and looked back. The man was staring at their retreating forms and Michael thought how very much he liked that hair. His curls might be considered slightly chaotic, but entirely natural; that man had a man-made mess of chaotic hair, and it was glorious. And his confused fear was delicious. Maybe he should have taken the time to mark the human, but the Becoming was calling, Gertrude was calling and he wasn’t going to disobey both. Everything would be part of the Distortion soon enough anyway. They were in their way to make sure it would.

Sannikova was everything the Distortion had implied it would be, and, of course, not at all like that. It even felt familiar as they approached, like a recurring dream one used to have, a feverish nightmare. Michael had felt the call and still... the Becoming was not his, he didn’t relish the idea of a world completely chaotic. What was a cat to do once there were no more glasses and pens to throw off the table?

He would have to get used to it.

The surrounding area was a maze. Gertrude guided them through it until the first door while Michael idly thought he should have a few words about predictability and mazes with the Distortion once this was over. They were getting closer to its heart. If she insisted on going forward, Michael would have to kill her, and he didn’t want to. She was doing a good job keeping the Eye busy and the lies hidden.

She rummaged through a bag and handed him a piece of paper. She took a paper of her own.

“Now, Michel, this is important, maybe the most important thing we will do in our lives. We are going to have to get in there and stop this thing...”

Michael looked down at the paper in his hands. For a moment he and the whole Distortion knew fear like never before. He recognized the nonsensical lines. It was a map, a map to the heart of the Distortion, and if Gertrude had sent anyone else instead of Michael, if she had gone in instead of Michel... But no. Michael had the map, and Gertrude was by his side, encouraging him to go on. They had to save the world.

“...we are running out of time. You will be more agile, so you should go ahead and see if there is something you can do until I get there. Run!”

Michael didn’t need to be told twice, he rushed inside the great twisting through a long corridor, with walls that had no concept of right and left, portraits of landscapes, mirrors that lagged, and colours that were only made to be seen by shrimps. And once he was inside, far enough, he looked back. Gertrude at the other side of the door was the only thing that made sense, but she hadn't even taken a step forward. Michael was a lie who belonged at that side of the door, he was many lies in a trenchcoat. He was, compulsorily, very good at lies. So when he walked through the door with a map that didn't make sense in his hands, when he looked back and saw Gertrude still out, when the door slammed shut, his face of surprised betrayal was excellent. 

Maybe too good at lies, because somewhere inside, he felt unfairly betrayed indeed.

The door had slammed shut, Michael was alone inside. Things were going almost according to plan, for a certain value of Plan. He didn’t need the map to navigate the halls. The yellow door was comparatively discrete among the myriad of unravelling things all around him. Michael was going to join all of it again. The Distortion was waiting. And at that moment both took a breath to wonder... Had they won?

It had won!

The Delusion had its Ritual and Gertrude Robinson had not managed to stop it! And it hadn’t even needed to plan. Planing was overrated, the Web was overrated; the way to go was just mayhem and vaguely forward.

And with that joy and the rapture of becoming, Michael joined the whole again, and it felt comfortable in its unfitting. The way you feel when you have had your eyes out and then you put them on again... or... maybe that wasn’t quite relatable. It felt powerful. It felt all-encompassing. It felt forever.

And then things crumbled.

Sannikova crumbled. But it didn’t really crumble, because that would have been a manner of chaos too. No. Sannikova simply settled, calmed and its foundations started to be comprehensible. Then the main parts of it fell into place like pieces of a puzzle, and little by little, _painfully orderly,_ the thing that wasn’t, was. All of Sannikova fled inwards, to the last part to join the whole, seeking refuge from the knowing. Michael had to hold the corpse of a paradox inside and Gertrude saw them. She wasn’t wearing her lies anymore, her face was just web-like plans and desolation.

It was only luck that saved them from Gertrude. She would have destroyed the pitiful remains of the Spiral if she had seen anything but what she thought she saw: The dying Distortion tied to the remaining sanity of her former assistant, also dying. She walked away and even in the excruciating ruins of their no-longer-triumph, Michael could spare a thought to be glad he would have the last lie in their game.


	2. After

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for inconsistent use of pronouns.

Upon its unbecoming unbecoming, the Spiral had been drained of all power. No doors, no halls, just a vagrant carried by Michael, hoping to catch a sniff of fear. The Distortion didn’t have many thinking structures: logic walked a zigzagging and looping tight rope in the Distortion. Michael had had to be human, though. He once had had to think structured thoughts, more than the raw Distortion at least, so the Spiral let it/him think about what had happened. The Distortion had found that even though it was Michael, and Michael was it, it could also _be_ Michael and _think_ Michael. It was proving to be useful yet again.

Theyithim waswere stuck small and powerless after the failure of the ritual. It had plenty of time to think.

Michael had been thinking these ideas: The ritual was to be broken by the intervention of Gertrude’s assistant. There was no breaking intervention on Michael’s part. The ritual didn’t happen. The ritual was broken by... nothing? The Distortion would have had that idea too without Michael. No, no, Michael knew something else, the ritual didn’t work... The rituals didn’t work?

The Distortion spent a whole week being a blue patch of grass because of the pain of Michael thinking something that made so much sense. No Fear had managed to complete a ritual since the fearing-kind started existing. There hadn’t been a Gertrude during all that time, there hadn’t even been humans during some of that time.

The ritual couldn’t be completed. Or at least not the way they thought. It made sense. It hurt.

And then something new happened, something that made the hurt more tolerable: Michael made it better by thinking more. Because if the rituals didn’t work, there was no reason or objective to its existence, or the existence of the other thirteen. And that meant... that being, _existing_ , was nonsensical. Life was a beautiful and terrifying coincidence. No purpose at all. And that gave the Distortion back a fair amount of power. Enough to build back its halls, its heart, its many doors... and to feed. Because that thought gave the Spiral power on its own, but it was also a deep fear in the hearts of many people who believed in a world that made sense. The pointlessness of every single action, the fear of not having a fate, the star signs not being real, the gods being made up... The weakness of that faith opened a chasm to... It.

It was delirious and the new power was completely dependant on Michael’s _logic._ Disquieting, interesting... They explored the possibilities, letting more of Michael’s structured illogic expand. Sometimes two parts of truth and one of lies were more effective than an outright lie. Very, very interesting...

It had peculiar results. And the current result was the man sitting at the other end at a coffee shop.

Steve had downloaded some pretty picture of a fractal to use as his icon, and since then he had been... having... problems. At the moment he was trying to write a script on his laptop. A few minutes ago he had been wearing headphones, but he had been hearing the vibrations of his mobile, and when he checked there were no new notifications. He thought there was something in the music that reminded him of a vibration. But now he wasn't wearing the headphones and he heard the vibrations clearly, and still each time... no new notifications. Steve had lost his focus so much that his document sat empty in front of him. He checked the phone for the nth time, expecting no notifications, but there was one. There was a message from an old childhood friend whose number he was sure he didn’t have. He unblocked his phone... and there was nothing. He was on the verge of self-doubt, considering getting a new phone or doubting his mind and sleeping a bit. In a day or two, it wouldn’t matter if he got rid of the phone, because every phone around Steve would behave the same way.

He slapped his laptop closed and stood with his coffee in hand and a bad mood brewing. At the same time, another man stood from a table close by and their paths collided. Steve was going to get very angry at the stranger because now he had spilt most of his coffee too, what a shitty day it was turning out to be. However, the target of his spilt hot coffee was some tattooed weirdo whose face screamed ‘I’m having a bad day too, are you going to make it worse for both of us?”. And Steve decided to go with “no”. He scurried away quietly.

Michael was acutely aware of where its mark was, and it wasn’t on Steve anymore, who would probably get home and think it was the worst day of his life when he realized he had been pick-pocketed.

Michael turned his attention to the thief.

The man was taking the lid of his big paper cup, and without much thought, he dunked the stolen mobile phone until the soft pink liquid almost overflowed. He put the lid back on and reached for a few paper napkins to dry himself. Quite peculiar. Worth getting closer.

Michael was suddenly by his side. He knew the man knew he was there because of the sudden tension, but he didn't look up from where he was cleaning his t-shirt.

"You owe me a meal," said Michael, getting tired of being ignored.

"You owe me clean clothes and a milkshake," the man said finally looking up.

He squinted and his eyebrows rose in recognition. He dropped the napkins on the table and leaned forward looking up and down. "This suits you better than your last lie."

And Michael finally recognized the man. It had been hard because the Distortion had displaced what he used to know while pretending to be human. Not only that, but the man had aged. Time was hard. There was a possibility that years had passed since that encounter. But now he remembered that hair, the face, Gerard. Michael's smile didn't falter at being recognized and known despite the discomfort.

"You are the little helper of the Archivist," it said with the slow and melodic quality the Distortion added every time.

"Something like that." He grabbed the milkshake with a topping of mobile and made to stand. "Now, if you don't have plans to fuck off, I'll find somewhere else to _try_ and have a drink in peace for once".

Michael laughed with mirth neither he nor the Distortion was feeling and almost automatically grabbed the back of Gerry's seat blocking his exit. The man in front of him was no longer exuding confused fear and that was a pity. Time seemed to have hardened this person and Michael was curious; could he be made to fear again? It should be a more entertaining challenge than driving mad a scriptwriter.

"You can have your drink in peace here." Gerry was clearly contemplating just ducking under its arm and weighing his chances of escaping knife-sharp hands. He must have decided it wasn't worth the risk, because he settled back down.

"You have been reading comics, Lady Deathstrike?" He pointed at the hand Michael was retreating, but he didn't get a response. "Whatever, but I think the title of Gertrude's helper is more yours than mine."

Michael laughed, delighted. "I'm quite sure she will tell you I was never of much _help."_

"I don't know about that, she seems to be under the impression you sacrificed yourself _valiantly,"_ Gerry made a dramatic gesture. "To save us all from the bad, bad Spiral."

"But that was Michel."

"Not you? Then who are you?"

"I'm not a who, I'm confusion given shape."

"And by which name goes Mr Confusion Given Shape?"

"Hmmm, I'm not a Mister either, but you can call me Michael."

"Of course, that won't get confusing at all-"

"Precisely!"

Gerry let out a weary sigh. "I haven't told her what I saw of you. Before you went to the secret mission in Russia."

Michael made a sound of interest that could have been easily mistaken with a microwave bell.

"When I asked, she went on and on about sacrifice and I think she was either trying to quiet her guilt or trying to get in my head the idea that one day I should do the same, so I decided not to tell her what you were."

“You still work with her.”

“You still stopped the ritual for her.”

“The ritual was stopped, it is a thing that happened.”

“I have not crossed paths with a thing of the Distortion until recently...”

“Maybe you are not twisted enough...”

“Are you calling me straight? I might take offence.” But he looked the opposite of offended. “I know what I’m talking about. I have found very few things of the Distortion. And there must be a reason.”

“A reason?” It laughed. “Reason is not a strength of mine.”

“Hmmm, I disagree, but I wonder. Do you remember Sanikova? Can you even think about it? I hear it left behind brutalist buildings or at least no-nonsense constructions. Can you remember that?”

They could. But remembering was hard. It could remember how it was before it fell, but the fall, it was slippery. The order and normalcy of it pulled any sense of randomness into neat categories and...

Bells over the door. Michael snapped out of the uncomfortable memory. Gerard was standing now, crossing a door, not his, leaving the coffee shop. Out of its immediate reach. He must have moved while the Distortion was locked in thought. Michael followed; that encounter felt unfinished. The static noise alerted Gerard, who kept walking tenser than before, but no faster.

“Ah, it doesn’t last long, then.” Gerard took a sip of his drink. The distortion had the sudden thrill of finding a completely different drink than the one Gerard had been carrying before. One without a mobile inside too. Gerard must have ordered a new one while the Distortion was out. “And no need to wonder what happens when I mention Sannikov anymore, I guess.”

Michael won’t let the Distortion fall twice for the same trick, so he forced it to think instead of the consequences of Sannikov. The safe meaning of life: no-meaning. He barely even stumbles before catching up with Gerard, who was hiding badly a smile in the drink.

The Distortion didn’t appreciate being played with. Michael didn’t appreciate having to pull the Distortion from a paradox again.

“You play with fire.”

“No, that was last month. I’m playing with a visual acid trip today.”

Gerard took another step and woke up. One of those dreams where your own leg moving wakes you... He blinked twice, thinking, and took another step. He looked daringly at the creature beside him, taking another sip from his paper cup. Clever people don’t taunt dangerous things with sharp claws. Gerard never claimed to be clever.

“You have _definitely_ been reading comics. The eternal waking? On me? Try harder.”

Gerry dropped his empty cup in a nearby bin and it sounded like it fell for a very long time, but he didn’t even question it. The creature was gone when he resumed his walking, but he was not stupid enough to believe it.

“Feel free to come to visit never,” he said anyway to the empty street.

Immediately, he found his drink in his hand again, and since he was sure he had just thrown away, his hand was drink-less again. He briefly thought he forgot something in the coffee shop before knowing positively that he hadn’t. He felt he had forgotten someone’s birthday, before being sure he had not wished anyone a happy birthday in the last five years. He almost laughed when he crossed paths with familiar people he knew were not really familiar.

The rest of the walk home was uncomfortable and testing that day, but at least it was not boring. And Gerard couldn’t help but think all the time it spent bothering him was time not spent getting to other humans, so it was fine.

The Distortion, on the other hand, was angry with Michael for not finding a way to eat the human. Being angry with oneself was not even new, but they preferred it when they inflicted it on others. They were tired; unsuspecting humans don’t push back, so this tiredness was new. The Distortion was still weak.

They should leave, give up on this one and find someone easier to haunt; high schools were full of self-doubt this time of year. The Spiral had no interest in someone who had both a firm grasp of his mind and no interest in indulging fantasies. One not always agreed with oneself. And so Michael decided, whether the Spiral liked it or not, that he was going to make Gerard confused and afraid again. For fun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I might turn this into a series of snippets with Michael haunting Gerry in different ways. After all, I have a draft with at least five conversations that I didn't manage to fit in this one. Would you be interested?


	3. Chapter 3

Gerry had gotten himself a stray monster. If he had known it would be this persistent, he would have let the man at the coffee shop lose his mind... no, he wouldn’t. But the point stood: he was being followed by the Distortion, all his protections were active when it was around, even when it didn't show itself. It was tiring. Keeping himself alert constantly was draining in a normal day; with the distortion added to the mix, it was exhausting.

Other days it was just a nuisance.

The last days, for example, he had been trying to keep the ear-worm of the hour out of his head. He countered the repetitive tunes by humming his favourite songs instead, like a kind of musical palate cleanser until the next catchy song would play at some shop, from the radio of a passing car, as the ring-tone of a confused bystander... It had quickly become routine, and the silver lining was that The Spiral was so tied to its chaotic nature that it never repeated a song, which would have worn him down much quicker. 

In fact, he wasn’t completely opposed to the mix of Dragostea, Hamster Dance and Caramelldansen he had been subjected to during that morning, it was just the principle of not letting it too deep into his mind.

His mother had seen the mark this attempt had left on him. It would wear off, as everything but the Eye did nowadays. She had been pissed nonetheless, she had _corrected_ his behaviour and forced him to take his earphones to any mission she sent him to. So, even though he liked being aware of everything around him, Gerard had taken his earphones for a walk. He played his favourite band to keep the ear-worms from reaching him easily. It worked very well blocking the noise in the street, at least it worked until an ad jumped at him with Blue (Da Ba Dee) as the background music. He huffed a laugh, half at The Spiral for its boldness and half ar his mother for her useless trick. He searched Evanescence’s least catchy song to counter the lyrics he was already feeling repeated in his brain. After a couple of minutes of peace, the player jumped automatically to the next song, which should have been something close to what he usually listened to, but it was You Spin Me. Of course, it was highly unlikely that _that_ would appear on its own. He searched for another author he liked, Voltaire, with a particular song in mind. His thumb hovered over the play button like a big, red, attractive-but-dangerous button. He pressed play.

When the lyrics hit the “...there is a hideous man named Mike...” the grey line stopped charging and jumped to the next one on its own. Gerry laughed out loud, startling a few people. He only laughed louder when his earbuds came with “...ring, ring, ring banana phone...”. He didn’t let it go much further, stopping it on the spot, but while he was searching for The Cure, it acted up and started playing The Final Countdown on its own.

“Come on!” Gerry whispered. “It is not a true ear-worm if it is a classic.”

“Hmm...I will agree to disagree,” Michael’s voice came from the ear-buds like a far-away radio host. 

The song changed to the Scooby-Doo theme without a break, as if it had always been playing that. Gerry wondered if it was a jibe at his monster-hunting ways.

Maybe he shouldn’t play with monsters, but he could blame his mother for desensitizing him to those things. He searched and played People are Strange by The Doors. It seemed to amuse the creature enough to let it play until the end. Then Gerry was regaled with The Lion Sleeps Tonight, Never Gonna Give You Up, and Mahna Mahna. He was not spiral-insane, but he couldn't be completely sane either, because he kept one earbud on while he dealt with his mother's mission and during the following interview of a witness. He felt the Eye there, feeding on the poor victim of a Flesh incident, but somehow it felt distant when one of his ears was listening to Why is the Rum Gone. 

Gerry had discretely unplugged the earbuds, and the songs didn't stop. He had expected as much, but playing with the cord made him very aware of how unnatural it all was, and it helped to keep him in his right mind. It also helped to make The Distortion aware of how its tricks were not working. It was relentless, but by the end of the day, the songs had morphed into things like Song 2, and Under Pressure. Gerry was not surprised that "targeting audiences of one" was a skill of the fears, something it probably shared with the Web. 

The day had gone in a blur, despite coming back to disappointment and its consequences when Mary discovered he had not shaken up the slight mark of the Spiral. Before going to sleep, Gerry wondered if what they were doing counted as trading mixtapes. He was surprisingly unbothered by the idea, and that night, unlike most nights when Mary was downstairs, he smiled before closing his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I won't put the number of chapters because I don't know when/if I will have time to post more.  
> So count this as unofficially unfinished yet


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gerry offers a deal to the Distortion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning angsty

Gerard was particularly sound of mind, Michael had to admit that much. The Distortion considered the attempts to eat him a fool’s errand, it was easier to prey on others, lure them to their door, follow them, carefully... The Distortion had learned its lesson. Nobody unsupervised in the halls. Who knew who had a map? If Gertrude had access to a copy machine, and Michael knew she did, who knew how many copies she had? No, nobody unsupervised in the halls, and especially not Gerard. That annoyance covered in eyes could have even memorized a map!

Michael was less concerned with that, and more concerned with the next step to make Gerard fall. It wasn’t going well. Gerard had stolen from Salesa a cash register that never had the money it was supposed to have. If one owned it for long it even made the owner think they had always used a currency that no longer existed.

“This is one of yours, right?” Gerard had said, as if he knew and expected Michel to be listening.

Michael refused to show up. It wouldn’t do to be expected. He... The Distortion was following the artefact, just the artefact, not Gerard.

The package was big and heavy, and Michael saw Gerard drag it close to the Institute, and come back out even more heavily weighted down. He walked to the closest construction site he could find and set the cash register on top of a layer of explosives. Michel had liked that artefact very much some times, especially when it drove managers up the walls and proved cashiers right, other days it was the other way around. The Distortion didn’t care about the distinction, Michael thought he did once, for a while, maybe still...

Anyway, blowing it up was a waste of chaos.

“If you deigned yourself to show up, we could make a deal.” Gerard sat on the box and pulled out his lightener.

Michael lied to himself. He wanted the artefact and not an excuse to show himself.

“More can be made.”

Gerard turned to the source of the voice, and a little more when Michel was not exactly there.

He smiled almost politely, Michael didn’t like it. “Then make more.”

Michael didn’t move, not technically. Not in any way that mattered. Gerard twisted his smile and he liked that more.

“That is what I thought. Look, I think you could probably make many more, but I also think you would rather not. Because you don’t like repeating your tricks right? I’m guessing it even hurts, and coming up with new tricks is hard.”

The cash register Gerard was sitting on made a shrill noise, opened its tray and hit the box it was in, making it sound indignant.

“Of course you are!” Gerard baby-talked down at the cash register. “A little capitalist nightmare! We wouldn’t want just to copy you, would we?” The traitorous cash register pinged more quietly.

Gerard looked back at Michael, who had made the space between them disappear without realizing it, and despite the self-assured smile, Michael read the tiredness in his eyes. He had dragged the heavy box through half of the town and still, his tiredness went deeper.

“Would you consider a deal, then?” Gerard didn’t let the smile slip from his lips, the tiredness didn’t slip from his eyes either.

“Speak.” Michael didn’t care about the cash register. The Distortion cared, but it was Michael who was interested in the deal.

“You can have your calculator from hell if you stop stalking me.”

“No.” Michael baulked and refused before even thinking about it, but he agreed with his first thoughts.

“Can you offer a better deal?” Gerard countered.

“I could...” Michael touched his chin with one of his long fingers “...find another artefact. Someone else’s”

“I don’t need another one when I have this one right here.”

Michael was listening, The Distortion was hearing. And what the distortion could hear was the sound of the Hunt in Gerard’s voice. Some dedicate and passionate hunt. Something Gerard wanted deeply hurt, and Michael was just there.

“Unless you have a Leitner for me, you are going to have to haggle with something more valuable.”

Michael sought knowledge of books in the distortion, but seeking knowledge in the distortion was in itself a mistake.

“Like what?” He said instead of wasting more time. “What would the likes of you consider valuable?”

“Information would be a good price, but I won’t be the daft one to ask the Deception for that.” Michael waited. He felt there was more to come, maybe he could hear the hunt too. “Under the circumstances, I would accept as payment something very, very small: Leave no more marks on me.”

Michael was confused yet again. The Distortion was gutted; a human confusing the Distortion, unacceptable.

“You have other ways to find me, Michael. Come on no more hickeys, mate.”

“That... could be arranged,” Michael said carefully, waiting for that hunt to end, to sink its teeth on him somehow. A mark was not painful, or easy to see, more like a stain, it was not payment enough to merit this, where was the sinking of teeth?

“Deal.” Gerard’s tiredness ebbed off for a moment with relief.

With painful suddenness, the confusion left Michael. The worst annoyance wasn’t Michael itself -and oh was the Distortion angry at that- the worst annoyance was the mark Gerard’s mother could see week in and week out.

Gerard stood from the box. He walked lighter, he moved with less weight to his steps. It was obvious now that it was gone. 

“I wouldn’t shake those knives to seal the deal if you paid me, so I guess that’s that.”

“There are other ways to seal a deal.” Michael played, but his door was not on it.

“Yeah, no,” Gerard almost laughed. Laughed! “I won’t waste blood, you can’t bleed and you won’t trick me into a kiss or something. So, so long and thanks for the respite, my good sir.”

The hunt was over. Gerard was in an excellent mood, and he was leaving the dark construction site with energy in his strides. It was not hard catching up and walking by him. This felt... wrong. Wronger than usual.

Gerard didn’t seem to mind his company. Nothing could sour his mood, apparently.

“I can’t erase the current mark. It will have to go on its own,” Michael tried.

“I know,” he answered simply.

They walked together for a few meters. Michael wondering, Gerard with that peculiar spring to his steps. Michael never passed the threshold of Pine Hurst, but he knew things. You didn’t stalk someone for months without learning something. He knew there were good days and bad days. Some days Gerry stopped in front of Pine Hurst and stared at the door instead of coming in, for example. But Michael hadn’t put it all together with such clarity until now.

“How did you survive?” Gerard broke the silence. Michael looked back at his now-cheerful eyes. He felt the wrongness again. Gerard must have read something in his face, or he thought he did because he explained himself. “The ritual. How did you survive?”

“One has to be alive to survive.”

“Fine, be like that. _How did you continue existing?_ ” He enunciated, still teasing and good-humoured.

“Some people are so sure their existence has a meaning and a purpose.”

Michael was not exactly telling the truth, it was not exactly lying. Gerard kept walking while he ruminated the answer.

“Can’t be! You saved the Distortion with nihilism?” Gerard was very amused, it showed in his voice, and if he were a creature of the Distortion Michael would be hearing echoing bells.

“Nihilism can be studied in books, beholder. I can’t.”

“You know, you could use my name from time to time.”

“Gerard?”

“Gerry, actually.”

They had reached a familiar street, though. And it turned out there was something that could sour Gerard’s mood. Gerry stood in front of the steps of Pine Hurst and waited. Michael waited too. On the second floor, a yellow light was on. Gerry walked up the stairs. Michael felt that vague wrongness again when the door closed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> too tired to edit we die like archival assisstants


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNINGS:  
> Child abuse offscreen, child death (consumption?) offscreen, locked in the dark, burns,

The Distortion was being dragged along, that was what was happening. Michael had decided, again, that Gerry would be an appropriate way to spend its time. It was mildly troubling because it meant Michael had a will that could and would disagree with the Distortion. But everything would be alright as long as Michael didn’t realize that.

The trick Michael had prepared for Gerry was complex. It involved callbacks to several other tries, it hinged in twisting the shallow connection to the beholding and using it against him and then striking. The Spiral was interested in seeing how Gerry sidestepped that, especially because Gerry seemed distracted today. Maybe today would be the lucky day.

But, just when they were making Gerry think he was walking in front of the building where he got injured last...

“Not today, Michael. Today is a special day.”

That boy was a pathological plan-ruiner. Also, he wasn’t exactly distracted as they had thought at first, it was something different now that they were up close. He was something else. Michael thought he was too full. Of thought maybe.

“A special day? Did I forget New year’s Eve again?” Michael engaged as if his 7-steps-plan hadn’t stumbled on the first one.

“Again? When did you...?” Gerry frowned.

“I wouldn’t know, that’s the point, isn’t it?” Michael smiled cryptically.

“I have no idea if you are... No, you know what? I don’t care.”

“I’ll live knowing I was close this time.”

“No, you weren’t!” Gerry didn’t smile, but there was a smile in his voice. “Exasperation was closer than delirium!”

“That is what you think you _think.”_

“Don’t get recursive on me, it doesn’t suit you.”

“You never answered why today was special.”

“No, I didn’t. What I said was ‘not today, Michael’, and that’s the part you just didn’t seem to hear.”

“Won’t you look at that?”

Michael kept its steps short to match Gerry’s.

“You are still here.”

“Mhhhyes.”

“Then come along, you are only going to get bored and leave early anyway.”

They reached a residential area where all the houses were almost a carbon copy of each other. They stopped in front of one of them. It had a garden, it had flowers, it was the kind of place that could hold a nuclear family and still have room for more stereotypes.

Gerry didn’t stop to admire any of it, he just walked up the path flanked by flowers and knocked on the door. Yet another door that wasn’t Michael’s.

A man opened and The Spiral was thrown off by the strength of an Avatar’s presence. The Dark. Michael noticed the windows of the house for the first time, looking normal at first, but cleanly boarded at a second glance.

The man matched the house; he looked like any ordinary London man would, and he recognized Gerry instantly. They were surprised to see in his face he was happy to see Gerry. Michael thought Gerry’s penchant for burning books would have already scared off any other supernatural contacts. Not this one, apparently.

“Gerard Keay! Does your mother have something new for me?” He looked at Michael curiously, but he didn’t pay attention to his hands, and Gerry didn't give him time to notice.

“Not exactly, Mr Woods. My mother is the reason I darken your front door, and I do have something for you, but I’m not here for her.”

“No?”

Gerry didn’t wait until the look of doubt settled on his face; he punched the man in the face, surprising everyone but himself. The guy stumbled and fell backwards, pushing the door fully open on his way down. Gerry didn’t cross the threshold to follow and the reason was obvious. The inside was pitch black, too dark. There was no way it was natural, but what would Michael know about natural.

Gerry pulled the foot that was not completely inside. The man struggled, but his leg was out and Gerry let his whole weight fall on it with a kick of his heel that must have broken the femur.

The man managed to pull his leg inside while he shouted in pain.

“What are you doing, Brat?! Your mother will hear about this!” Came from the darkness.

“I really hope she won’t. Not anymore.”

Gerry had produced a flare from his inside pocket. He must have planned this, and he knew the kind of danger this apparently dull house presented. It barely lit up a couple of feet in front of himself, but he walked inside, following the retreating servant of the dark.

“Are you going to come in?”

Gerry was offering him a second flare. Michael cracked a smile and then cracked his knuckles, just before his fingers started to glow. Seeing Gerry roll his eyes as he pocketed the flare back was worth the theatrics.

They came in, and the noises in the dark reminded him of the halls, but something hit deeply different knowing there was something indeed there, and that your mind was not playing tricks on you. Space was different there too. They were not in a house anymore, it was a thing closer to the Vast. He didn’t know it, but he felt the space. He was aware of how the Dark made space warp and made everything go as far and as close at the same time as it would help their fear. The Distortion’s halls were more comfortable. And more creative.

“I suggest you leave while you can Mr Woods,” Gerry shouted. “If you are here once I get the child out, you won’t find enough shadows to hide from me.”

Michael was starting to get a clearer picture of what they were doing there.

Mr. Woods voice came from behind them.

“You are too late. This one was a good one.”

Gerry pointed the flare in the direction of the voice and there was a shout of someone being briefly burnt, even though hey never saw his face. Gerry frowned, still not looking at the voice but forward, trying to find something, probably by Knowing it, but the eye was blind in a place like this.

Michael, though, he understood the shape of it, the not-shape too, and the ways both were at the same time. The vast blindness was simply familiar. He didn’t guide Gerry through it. That would mean being helpful, and he wasn’t that; but he certainly stood in front of Gerry, body angled to the right, the way cats sometimes stare at a point in the wall for no apparent reason. What interesting creatures, cats.

Gerry read into it and followed the not-direction. There was a door to a basement. Yet another door that didn’t belong to the Distortion. It was ridiculous, the number of doors Gerry crossed daily. It opened easily and Gerry walked down the stairs to a room with bare brick walls, a dirty mattress not touching any walls and not much more.

“I told you so.” Came from up the stairs. “This one was a good little boy. He was already so scared of the dark, it was so easy to turn it into terror...”

A laugh, raspy and dry, and the door closed. Gerry only stopped to take out a second flare before the first one could die on him. Michael observed, taking in the stink of dirty human, dirty child, the old sweat and other human leakings. Gerry searched the basement carefully, empty as it clearly was, upturned the mattress and came up short. There were no plush toys or bracelets left behind to feel some kind of closure at least.

Gerry looked very different when he climbed the boards of the stairs back up, not minding the dark snapping at his ankles from between the steps. He crouched in front of the door.

“I’m assuming you don’t need to breathe,” he said with his voice muffled by the t-shirt he had pulled up over his nose. “If you do, you’d better cover up.”

Gerry swiftly took out his lighter, jammed it in the door by the lock, and pointed his flare at it.

“Mr Woods, let us out yourself, and this can still be moderately civil.”

“You will run out of things you burn, and then the Dark won’t have mercy on either of you, Keay.”

“I’ll burn that mattress before that happens,” Gerry whispered, and then: “Listen, Mr Woods, I have my mother’s resources, we can come to an agreement. Let my friend go, he has nothing to do with this.”

But Gerry was not negotiating. Michael had seen Gerry negotiating, this was not it, this was a lure. And it worked: Mr Woods’ voice was getting closer to the door.

“I don’t need to d-”

It had taken a while, but the lighter exploded.

Gerry threw his weight forward and broke the weakened door open. Mr Woods was scattering back into the shadows. Michael had the pleasure of seeing Gerry turn back to him, framed by the still-burning door, flare in hand. He looked ar Michael, apparently to check if he was alright, and turned his attention back to Mr Woods.

Michael realized Gerry didn’t stray too far from Michael, never far enough to let the dark a foothold between them. He was navigating the space and Michael didn’t know if he was looking for the man or the exit.

“It was a bit disappointing, the way the boy just cracked.”

Gerry turned around looking for a face that wouldn’t be there.

“I was ready to make him see the kind of monsters that can be found in the dark.”

His voice came from a completely different place. His steps didn’t make a sound. Gerry turned anyway. His flare was pointed at the black ahead, but it didn’t burn Mr Woods this time.

“He will never know now.”

The half-consumed flare pointed at the opposite direction. The only thing preventing Gerry from going after him was his reluctance to leave Michael in the dark, even glowing as he was.

“Do you even know he is trying to make you waste your time, and your light?” Michael pointed out with a soft tired laugh.

“I know. I know, I know. I’m thinking...” Gerry groaned. “No, I’m not! I’m not thinking. That’s the problem.”

He stood closer to Michael, clearly letting go of Mr Wood’s words.

“Hey, Michael,” he said, visibly calming down. “You once said I owed you a meal. Why don’t you help yourself? My treat. The guy is already bonkers to do what he has been doing anyway.”

“How is it your treat if I hunt him down?” Michael asked, considering how long the flare would last and stepping closer to Gerry.

“Oh, I can make it my treat.” His smile had an unusual edge. “Bend down, beanstalk, you are far too tall. I'm calling this the Anish Kapoor curse.”

Gerry pulled him from the neck and bent to murmur Mr Woods’ obvious weakness in his ear.

“Oh!” And Michael didn’t know if it was an oh to the gesture or an oh to the words.

It was a deliciously twisted idea, though. Michael called a door to them. It was black, very black, but it was not a door of the Dark, so it looked grey against the oppressive nothingness. Gerry huffed almost a giggle.

They walked away from it. Michael made more black things. A carpet here, a vase there, a window over there... All traps that would spring as soon as Mr Woo-

There was a crash, the vase fell and broke. Michael felt the hook tensing.

“What?”

Because now he had crossed paths with something that wasn’t of the Dark and didn’t move out of his way.

“What is...?”

But as his eyes got used to it, he could see the broken vase, grey against the black, and his eyes drew the corners of many more things. Something that happens in any dark place, your mind tries to make up the parts it can’t see, and most of the time it is useful, but sometimes... well, sometimes it plays tricks on you,

“Where is the-?”

There were gasps and shouts. The line tensed more and Michael, metaphorically pulled. Mr Woods’ mind started to draw lines where there was only darkness, and once it had the lines, it filled it in with black. Not absolute black, just black, so mundane it could be called grey, maybe even dark blue. There was simply no black.

“Where is it? Whe-? Where did it go?”

They couldn’t see what Mr Woods was seeing, of course, it was all in his mind, after all. But they could hear him scream. And then they could hear him sob.

“You! You did this! You took it from me!”

The flare in Gerry’s hand was consuming its last minutes, but its light went farther than a few feet now. Darkness was receding. It could sense weakness and leave.

“Why?!”

The light of the flare finally illuminated the kneeling body of Mr Woods, surrounded by shards of the black vase. Gerry crouched and picked one up. Down there the light illuminated Mr Woods face. He was crying a dark sludge that ran down his face like mascara. He looked at a point in the middle distance, too overwhelmed by the shades of black his mind was painting. Michael guided him up and manhandled him to an open yellow door.

The snap of the closing door worked like a switch. Gerry’s red flare illuminated a common room with boarded windows and made their shadows dance on the walls. The door to the basement was burning on the back too. Gerry reached for the front door and held it open for Michael. Oh, the paradox of it all irked and delighted the Distortion in equal parts.

Once on the street, Gerry fought himself to throw the flare into the sewer, then sat on the sidewalk.

Michael folded himself to sit by his side.

Gerry was quietly facing up to the brighter clouds like he was basking in the sunlight.

“That house is going to burn.”

“Yes, it fucking is.”

“You should not be here by then.”

“I won’t be.” He stretched, still like a cat in the sun. He looked at his own hand and it was only then that Michael noticed the burns.

The explosion must have burned him, but he had not complained once. He couldn't tear the stretchy fabric of his t-shirt onehanded, so he pulled, looked at Michael, at his hands and at the t-shirt meaningfully. "Do you mind?" Michael didn't mind. They cut part of the t-shirt and bandaged the hand sloppily. The house behind them was making worrying noises, soon there would be smoke.

“Okay.”

Gerry stood and walked away. Michael followed. The Distortion would be annoyed any other day, but it was fed, it had an interesting trick for any further encounters with the Dark, and it was starting to see the benefits of keeping Gerry around.

“You are curious,” Gerry laughed after a few streets.

“No, I’m not.” Michael tried to stay calm at the insult. “I’m not asking,” he pointed.

“Yes, you were!” Gerry exclaimed. “I walked us in circles to get here, in a neighbourhood where everything is the same, but you were too curious to even notice or to get bored.”

“You told me I would get bored. I was just being contrary,” they lied.

“I have done the same for the last five minutes and you have not noticed,” Gerry deadpanned.

Michael was caught. “...I blame Michael’s time at the institute for _that_ shortcoming.”

Gerry kept his smug smile badly contained and kept walking.

“Do you want to know?” He tempted.

“Do I?”

“Yes, you do.” He didn’t wait. “I did... something. I trusted someone; I don’t know if I should have. They have proved to be... inconsistently trust-worthy.”

“You trusted _Gertrude,_ ” they said, a confusing mix of feelings rising to the surface.

“I did,” Gerry gave up with a sigh.

Michael laughed long and hard. It was bitter. “That is _incredibly_ stupid of you.”

“And talking with Confusion given shape here was any less stupid?” Michael didn't have an answer for that, it didn't have a clue why Gerry kept talking to it.

“What was the trust about?”

“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that if I misplaced my trust, I’ll be a dead man walking, but at least I stopped this. If she comes through, well, then I could have done this at any time and the rush was not needed.”

“Then the point was...”

“I knew Mr Woods for nearly a decade. I knew what he did, and I did nothing to stop him. I couldn’t. Just in case... So I needed the courage of _hoping_ this would work. Whether it does or doesn’t. Does it make sense?”

“Only in a twisted way.”

“You must be finally rubbing off on me, after all.” Gerry elbowed Michael.

Suddenly all the doors they passed were yellow and Gerry laughed.

“Not that much.” He looked distractedly at the doors. “Look, I’m going to the Institute to see... To see if Gertrude managed the impossible. I don’t think you’ll want to be seen there, but that is where you’ll end up if you follow me.” 

Michael thought of what Gerry said, a dead man walking, and decided to leave. If they didn’t, they would stick to see what that entailed and to see if that fate could be curved. Maybe it didn’t mind being seen by Gertrude if it meant twisting Gerry’s death. Maybe it would keep a door by the Archives, or by Pine Hurst. If they didn’t leave immediately they would be tempted to act.

He reached for one of the yellow doors and all of them opened. But before he crossed it he looked back, Gerry was looking at him and for some reason, it mattered. He looked worried, but at peace, and nothing like the frantic side it had seen of him in the dark. It clicked.

“What was in those flares to make the Dark recede?” Michael asked anyway.

“I modified them using Desolation pages from a Leitner. I was destroying someone’s beloved dark, so it counts as destruction too. Even for the _Lightless_ Flame.” Gerry didn’t move, Michael didn’t either. “And you know what? You asked; _that_ is curiosity.”

He smiled again while taunting a monster, and they hoped against hope that Gertrude would not betray him. Hoped she would not doom him too. Hoped Gerry wasn’t really a dead man walking. Hoped he would taunt them again. The Distortion was not made for hope. All the yellow doors slammed shut behind it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did my research:Lighters don't explode exactly like that  
> Don't try to explode lighters  
> let mythbusters do it for you


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings at the end.

Gertrude had been useful at least. Gerry had come back to a glass jar of ashes. He was suspicious when the ashes seemed less than what he thought a book that size would produce, but she had not come back and that had to mean Gertrude had done her part.

He had had a very long week after that, keeping an eye open at every moment to check if she was finally back to exact her revenge. He had gone home every night and there had not been a single noise, and that was worse. _Somehow_ that was worse than the rattling of the woman who made _her_ life and post-life into _his_ living hell. And somehow, it was worse. Somehow. Unbelievable.

Now that she was gone, his life was not better, just barren. And knew he should build something out of it now that he could; he had space and time now, but... he felt like he lacked the tools. Everyone had a head start, everyone knew what to do, where to go... Everyone had filled their lives with things they liked, or things they didn’t really like anymore. Everyone had made their fair share of mistakes. But when Gerry looked at his room, at himself, at his choices... He felt deeply the claws of Her. Everything he had done had been to please her or to displease her. She had been the axis of his existence. It was an axis made of fear and hatred, but she had been his anchor, and now... he drifted.

He didn’t miss her voice or her smiles, but she had been his single point of reference through all his life. What was he to do now? Had anything changed in the end? He didn’t have goals and aspirations. He was aware the only thing he carried was his hatred towards cursed books, but awareness didn’t help to fill that void. It just highlighted how alone Mary had left him.

Feeling that way was a danger on itself, he knew. He had been made aware of it too.

Pine Hurst was warded, but every time he went out for any reason London’s fog became thicker. It wasn’t really London’s fog and he didn’t need help figuring that one out. For days he had been fighting it however he could, in any way he knew, but he could only outrun it for so long. Surprise, trying not to feel alone some days just drew attention to the fact itself.

He walked away from the fog when it was weak, he avoided crowded spaces where he felt alone, he stopped walking at night on his lonesome no matter how comforting it used to be, he tried to use the few streets that held vaguely happy memories for him. Despite his efforts, he was slowly running out of warmth. He looked out of the window at the wisps of white; the wards at Pine Hurst would be overwhelmed one day. He had pissed off enough Lukases through his life to make sure of it. 

It was a sunny evening when he noticed the cold of the fog at his heels too close. He had grasped for a nice memory and his hands slipped through nothing. He was alone. His reason to be alive, his spite, was tied to a twice dead woman, and if he disappeared like her, nothing would really change. It hurt. She had hurt him for such a long time, and now he was... salted earth. He couldn’t go back to ignorance, and he had nothing to make him go forward with his mission. Nothing would grow out of his ruins. He was so numb. She had ruined his life and she might have ruined it forever. Was he even capable of connecting with anyone in a meaningful way? How pathetic was it that talking to a cashier was the only human contact he had had in days?

He didn’t see where he was going. He couldn’t. He could feel the fog creeping up, he could smell the humidity in the air, pooling heavy in his lungs, clogging his throat. He couldn’t cry, he didn’t have enough energy for that. He turned many corners trying to reach a memory of warmth. He crossed arches, he went into nice shops and out of them, he walked looking at his feet with too dry eyes, he opened a door, he walked away trying to outrun the numbness.

And maybe... maybe he was not numb, he was angry, he was blind with rage, and rage was better than loneliness, because how dare that woman encroach so deep in his mind as to destroy him by simply disappearing? How dare she? He hadn’t had a pleasant childhood, he hadn’t had a childhood, full stop, because of her. So how could she claim this too? He was an adult now.

He walked not looking up, a black rug and a yellow carpet passed under his steps.

But what? What did he have that wasn’t tainted by her? Was there something? It didn’t seem like it. He... he had to do something about it. He had to... He had no idea of where to start; building a life was a daunting idea. Too vast. Oh, just perfect, he really didn’t need to attract more entities to himself. But it was too big. He was more or less aware of how a real-life worked, how people had friends or contacts. He knew how others had spent time together learning the little human things. He didn’t feel human enough. He didn’t have childhood friendships to reconnect with, he didn’t have a... a CV! He couldn’t get a job, he couldn’t say what he had been doing with his life up to this point.

He turned right at some point, not looking where he was going, just letting his feet wander.

And still, he had... He had too many choices now. And he didn’t have the will to go for any of them. It was just easier, letting the inertia do its thing, keep hunting books, keep up the hate, pursue the path of revenge.

He turned right.

There was nobody there, but there was a voice, a loud whisper. It sounded sad, lonely and desperate, not angry...

Oh, it was himself? His voice?

“I don’t want to miss her. I don’t want to. She was a monster, why do I miss her? This was supposed to be easy. Getting rid of monsters is not something new, so why not her?”

He wasn’t entirely sure of why he was talking to himself or why he could feel a couple of fat tears distorting the hall ahead of him.

He turned right.

There was static in the air, he was feeling dizzy. He was going to make himself sick over-thinking.

He knew there had been things he wanted to do before his mother crushed his half-formed dreams. But it seemed... overdue. He was simply too old for many of those rusty and forgotten dreams. Art school? Love? Travelling the world? It all seemed so childish... too bright? What was he supposed to want? Having a house, a stable job, planting a tree, writing a book...? He had no desire to do any of that.

He vaguely noticed the swirling pattern of the wallpaper. He turned right.

What did he want, then? He had wanted to run away from her with such passion, and he had known escaping her was impossible, so he had forgotten to consider the aftermath. Why did he want to run away, and where to? Did this mean he was better off under her claws after all?

He turned right. What awful art there was in this... gallery.

He had difficulty telling apart what he was supposed to be and do from what he wanted to be and do.

He couldn’t feel the fog anymore, but he didn’t feel any less lonely inside. It was messy inside. There were thoughts he hadn’t dared to think while she was alive and all of them were coming for him now. Fears so old to have met their expiration date, fears that went through him turning to dust and covering him in doubts.

“I should do something, so why am I still here stuck. It’s been weeks. I should have decided something by now.”

He turned right.

There was someone there.

He was startled. He looked at the... at Michael, it was Michael. And then it all rushed back to him. He looked around. He was not in some gallery. He had been careless. He had been so worried about the Lonely that he had forgotten about his other frequent visitor. Michael was at the end of the hall. What now? Should he run in the opposite direction? But he was already caught. Should he...?

Michael was approaching. He should run. But he had been lost for a while, hadn’t he?

Michael was close. Michael didn’t pounce. Michael stood there. Gerry stood there. He was unable to read a face already hard to read even in the best of days.

“You reek of the Lonely,” it said. “You shouldn’t be here.”

Michael had an open door behind him, right where the hall had been. He didn’t have the giddy energy that usually followed his gestures, or the languid laughter. It seemed to be angry, bothered... disappointed. Its features changed and rearranged into the familiar unrecognizable face shortly after that. Gerry only managed to guess it was something negative before it moved aside and his curls hid even that much.

“I don’t accept scraps from the Lukas’ table.”

Gerry didn’t know what to think, but he was in the halls of confusion. His instincts decided for him and he passed by Michael, sideways, to not turn his back on the threat, and he walked out. It was his street, by his front door, where fog lapped at the walls like waves frozen in a storm.

He stared some more at Michael, not knowing what to say, and the door slammed closed on its own. He went into Pine Hurst. What had been that? None of those monsters was above collaborating. They all used the dark, and most of them hunt their prey when alone, if not always lonely. So even if he _reeked of the Lonely,_ it wouldn’t have been a deterrent forthe Distortion. It didn’t make sense, unless the Distortion had become territorial?

Gerry walked to one of the fogged windows and stared at the spot where the door had left him. He put his hands in the pockets of his jeans. There was a shard there that almost cut him. He took it out with some curiosity and was reminded of the day he had taken down Mr Woods with Michael’s help. The following days he had been stressed, looking out for vengeful ghosts, yes, but with the shard in his hand, he thought he could remember things he had forgotten. Random unobtrusive doors, random forgettable mops of blond hair, random feelings of being more watched than usual, and then made to forget...

Maybe... Maybe the Spiral hadn’t become exactly territorial.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: The lonely and its depressive episodes, vertigo at a life unlived, vertigo at the consequences of abuse
> 
> This is slowly becoming my way to deal with writer's block, to the quiet horror of all my WIPs
> 
> Also! I have an original script written for a podcast about an urban fantasy where the mafia controlling the magic supply mess with the wrong tiny woman who will make them sweat, supported by her queer-found-family. I'd kill to have it out there with real readers, so ask me about that if you want to make my day!
> 
> As always, I don't know how far I will take this, I don't know if it will end up being & or / just enjoy the ride with me


	7. Chapter 7

Michael saw Gerry descend into the Lonely day by day. They had been haunting Gerry since he said he was “a dead man walking”, and at the hands of Gertrude too. Michael had been lying to itself for some time, playing pretend, saying hunting Gerry was a way to become stronger. Because surely if Gerry Keay was taken, anyone could be taken; not that it was a complete lie. They had been very aware of Gerry’s whereabouts since then, even before the suggestion of death entered the picture. So, after many attempts to guide the young man’s mind astride, it had known the exact day when the Forsaken had turned its interest on him.

The plan had been to lure Gerry with a victim that day. It had expected to trick Gerry into a conversation, to at least cross paths with him and learn -just casually, not out of curiosity- if Gerry was in danger still. But at the crucial moment, right when it knew Gerry would jump to help the victim he just... didn’t. He didn’t see the lure, walked straight past the alley without looking back like he was running away from something.

The confused lure walked away when they noticed the Lukas’ fog stalking Gerry. It thought Gerry would shake it off easily; he had to have a good number of roots with the many people he had saved over the years, right? Gerry could befriend even monsters, he had to have many people to guide him out of losing himself, right? It couldn’t be the danger he had feared.

It stalked Gerry closer than before. Time passed, but the fog, surprisingly, didn’t. It grew thicker instead. Disgustingly thick: there was a thing called excess and Michael didn’t know of it, but this had to be it. They couldn’t stand it. The closer Gerry drifted away, the less the Distortion could stand it. Something had to be done. Gerry had been ambling so listlessly that he couldn't tell a door from a window, much less an odd door, and so Michael had what it wanted. Gerry was in the halls.

It tasted not of confusion. It still tasted of lonely panic, and as soon as he crossed the door, lonely suppressed with anger. It didn’t taste like chaos and delusion, but the fog couldn’t slip through the cracks here. The compromise would have to do. Then again, Gerry didn’t know where he was... as soon as he knew... as soon as he realized... it wouldn’t take long...

The Distortion had a rule. No unsupervised victims in its heart, no humans in the halls, it was a vulnerability; letting people into the halls was so dangerous. Letting Gerry into the halls was particularly dangerous, because who knew if Gertrude had given him a map too? But he was there to keep Gerry lost this time, so it wasn’t too drastic. And it didn’t take any effort to keep Gerry lost, he was so deep in his mind... It wasn’t confusion, no, it was just a loop of painful thoughts that made a lot of sense.

Having him in the halls was more and more disconcerting by the second. It could feel his fears and delve in his mind. Because there were fears inside of him, yes, fears it would have manipulated any other day but... those left an acrid taste in their mouth. There wasn't fear of the dark, but there was fear of inadequacy. There was no fear of change or desolation, but there was a fear of ageing and being unable to adapt and overcome time. There wasn't a fear of the Slaughter, only its consequences. His fears were too sensible, and so many of them were rooted in loneliness it was maddening. Of course in the halls, all of Gerry's fears could be twisted, but it wouldn’t, and Gerry had not even noticed where he was yet!

Michael decided to get hands-on, instead of stalking from the pictures that Gerry was not even checking. The thrill of fear when it appeared at the end of the hall was very short-lived. The first scare was sweet, breaking his train of thought was even better, but it instantly gave way to an unusual resignation paired with silence and motionless. Completely unlike Gerry, but exactly the way a victim of the Lukas’ would act. It made keeping Gerry in the halls unpleasant, and throwing him to the streets was the most sensible solution, but Michael was not thinking ahead, just acting. It did what it wanted, and it threw Gerry out at his own front door. That should be unexplainable enough to appease the whole of the Distortion.

Gerry was certainly more confused at being let out than kept in, and that was the kind of confusion it liked, short-lived as it was. The not-knowing and not-understanding of someone linked to the beholding. There was no fear in his confusion, only numbness, but they closed the door before either of them could reflect on that.

They put a door in front of Pine Hurst and didn’t move it. Stalking their prey, it justified itself. It couldn’t lie to itself much when the fog receded and they took pleasure in it, it meant less competition. The Spiral approved of taking Gerry from the Forsaken if he brought enough chaos to compensate, but they knew they had attracted unwanted attention when shortly after, in between doors and doors, a branch in the halls turned grey and blue, too cold, humid, and with portholes. There was a knocking that echoed through every hidden space of their labyrinth. The Spiral pushed Michael to deal with the trouble it had called to their doors.

Michael just left and didn’t open the door.

Any of the times it was knocked on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have two more chapters prepared! Also, it is growing a little plot. I'll post them on Sundays, ok?
> 
> And since some people actually asked about the podcast script I'm writing (I love you, so much), I'm dropping a [link](https://docs.google.com/document/d/13WVEUffWTDU7MMYo2IjZRn38kB6j8k32xKJaPpz7uOY/edit?usp=sharing)
> 
> It is set so anyone can comment anywhere.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which consequences come knocking

Michael kept following Gerry as soon as he started Leaving Pine Hurst again. Something had changed. He seemed to kick the fog away with his steel-toed boots easily now. He started visiting the Institute again and it looked like he was making an effort to meet people wherever he went. Shallow and fleeting meetings, but with the kind spark to become something more that kept the Lonely away.

Michael didn’t know if it liked the new routine, but it liked how it kept the Lonely away. It also meant Gerry talked More to Michael, because he talked more in general.

Michel followed him to bury books, to burn them, to meet librarians who thought they had something special... and it was while talking and waiting for one of those librarians that Michael noticed for the first time the piece hanging from Gerry’s neck.

“What would happen if I played two truths and a lie with you?” Gerry was asking.

“How would I _know_?” Michael had answered, but its attention had drifted.

The pendant had been there for a while but for someone like them, reality was unstable enough to make the lack of attention to detail a compulsory part of their personality. They also didn’t care for comfortable distances, so they reached out for the choker on Gerry’s neck.

“Why is this?”

“Nothing,” even with a nonsensical question, the answer felt like a lie. “A choker. It’s new, thank you.”

Gerry pushed the knife-hand from his neck and the middle piece fell back and made contact with the skin on his neck again.

“I didn’t say I liked it.”

“Then I take back the thank you,” he said with a hint of humour and many more hidden hints of nervousness.

Michael was still staring.

“Look, don’t read too much into it.”

But Michael belonged to the entity of thinking too much until nothing made sense and only the Web did it more than them. The choker had the shape of an eye, similar to the tattoos all over Gerry. It was crafted out of metal; shiny, simple and silvery, and it only served to frame the piece inside. The inside was porcelain and it had two shades of something very close to black. The lighter line, with a slight green shine to it, crossed the eye from side to side drawing a double spiral in the middle, where the pupil would be.

Michael didn’t need to look at it to describe it with perfect accuracy. Didn’t need to look at it to know the lighter line moved in confusing ways when you didn’t pay attention.

“Really! Don’t... don’t make it weird!”

That single line, that single spiral cutting the eye in two, had been made by the Distortion. It didn’t have to think hard about when. Michael was not used to making black artefacts, and so, it could only be part of the vase it created not that long ago to confuse a Dark follower.

“It’s not... its not a mark, okay? Look, look at these...” Gerry pointed at his tattoos. “And I don’t hate the beholding any less for it, see?”

Gerry must have pocketed a shard and touched it up to make the choker he was wearing.

“Its not... meaningful, okay? I carry around shit of all the freak entities all the time. It means nothing. I had nothing of The Distortion, and now I do.”

Michael froze his face and suppressed the smile that was threatening to split him from the inside when it clicked. Gerry was nervous! And confused! And struggling with lies! He hid it well under anger, but there was no two ways about it. The only thing that could have made it sweeter was being the one responsible for it. Unfortunately, Gerry had walked himself into whatever was making him doubt his mind this much. Michael didn’t talk at all, he just enjoyed Gerry getting himself deeper and deeper into his mess.

“I mean, It helped once... twice, okay? So it was just useful. You can’t just make it mean something like... like those damn cultists. And also... it is within an eye, right? That should neutralize it!”

“If it is neutralized” Michael laughed, he couldn’t help it. “If it is neutralized... it is not useful, don’t you think?” Michael quipped while it pressed the tip of its index finger into the spiral.

“Not that kind of useful!” He slapped the hand away again. “I mean, yes, that kind of useful when you used it against Woods, but I meant useful to rememb- I really don’t need to explain myself, you know? I picked it up, I used it, it is no longer yours. End of the story. And, if you make it weird, if you make it mean something, I will just burn it with the next book.”

“Burn?!”

Both of them turned to the agitated librarian who had just arrived in time to catch the tail end of the conversation. Michael smiled just enough to make it unnerving. Gerry cursed under his breath. Some owners of Leitners were stubbornly against burning books despite seeing its effects firsthand.

“Don’t worry, Ms. Alvarez, it is an inside joke. My associate and I don’t condone any kind of book burning.”

Michael always had the chance to play around with the minds of people Gerry met. Not everyone, but making librarians scared of finding something nonsensical walking down their shelves was fun. This one would see a big orangutan reading in the far corners of the shop whenever she was sleep-deprived.

“And apart of the late owner’s death, have you seen or felt anything unusual?” Gerry was unsubtly interrogating the librarian. 

After meeting with her, Gerry would go to the Institute for a piece of research and Michael would leave. Michael was not looking forward to that. The hallways had become... hostile, towards him. Spending any time in them always seemed to make him wander to the sea-themed halls that were slowly turning sensible with turns to both the right and the left. All their attempts at sealing that part or cutting it off had been useless.

Out of frustration, Michael had opened the door making all the knocking one day. A Lukas, and Michael suspected this was the infamous Peter, had been at the other side. He hadn’t moved, had just stared long and hard at it. He exuded judgmental disappointment everywhere he looked, a trick he had probably learnt from standing around the Beholding too much.

Everyone seemed to get too close to the Beholding lately.

He hadn’t answered to Michael’s taunts, he hadn’t spoken back at all, he had only stood there, making him feel abandoned, making him remember the day Gertrude had walked away from Sannikova. The Distortion was impervious to such things, but Michael... The Lukas had left without ever speaking a single word, but Michael knew they had lost something in the way the fog made rivulets around their ankles, and since then the sea-themed wing had been expanding.

Maybe they would give the librarian something worse than an Orangutan in the distance. They deserved a treat.

“That will be all, then,” said Gerry after who knew what conversation.

He wasn’t carrying the paper bag with the book, so Michael was almost sure it was fake after all. It called a door to leave as soon as Garry mentioned the Institute, but the door that showed up was not yellow. It had mashed with some blue and now it was a sickly green. He wasn’t the only one to notice a change.

“I’m going to the Institute to tell- What’s with the doormat? Feeling antisocial?”

Michael looked at the floor. A doormat said “go away” in capital bold letters.

Gerry had leaned closer to inspect the new paint too. He looked at some point of Michael intently, but he didn’t ask, and Michael didn’t volunteer any information.

“See you whenever, yeah?” Gerry didn’t walk away, he looked... It didn’t know how he looked, but not normal, and not confused.

Michael didn’t have time to think about it. They had to brush sea salt from their walls before it became permanent.

At least the Lonely had left Gerry, paradoxically, alone.


	9. Chapter 9

Their halls were becoming unbearable. No matter what they did, everything changed back to the bland corridors of the Lonely. It was undeniable; the infection spread, and now there were rooms as well as halls; big rooms, cold rooms, with chairs all over the place and every single one of them was uncomfortable. The pictures were... different. Less, in a way. Not pictures you could get lost in, but simple pictures of inhospitable landscapes, people who looked like once knew you but would never recognize you now, pictures you see and you space out in melancholy... And sometimes pictures of Michael with a family that never was, a life that never was lived, friends who had left him alone despite never existing...

Nearly the worst part was the first time they met a human there and it wasn’t theirs. It was a scared little thing navigating the solitary space without a single memory to keep them warm. They were technically in the halls, but not confused, just resigned. They didn’t know if leading the humans that kept appearing to the streets hurt the Lonely. Probably it was just taking out the trash that an unwilling flatmate had left behind. But that wasn’t the worst part.

No, the worst part was when Michael got lost.

_Lost._

****Michael****.

 ** _ **In its own halls**_**.

It shouldn’t be possible, and yet...

Michael had scratched the walls as it walked through and tried to find the root of the problem since they were already in it, but the unknowable quality of the original place stayed intact. And no matter what it knocked down or what it destroyed, things soon grew a certain timbre, like a layer of dust, as if everything had always been ruined like that. It had walked through opulent rooms filled with stale air and fireplaces long abandoned, through rooms out of magazines that looked like an exposition where no soul had ever lived, through so many empty rooms, rooms where you knew you were alone at sea without connection or anyone who cared. After a long while navigating rooms uselessly, Michael had stopped. It had sat on the ground -not those chairs- and had waited until one of those Lonely bastards would dare to talk to it.

No response.

Nothing had happened except for boredom. It had given up and managed to walk back to its untainted halls with some effort, but the infection followed every step of the way. Soon there would be no hiding anywhere. And what would happen then? They didn’t have any idea, so they stayed out of the hallways as much as they could, for as long as it could, because getting out was becoming hard too.

Today it was an airport. The Spiral could see a lot of potential in airports; it was the Vast’s territory, of course (and they didn’t want yet another enemy right now), but the rush and the timetables and having to cross through bright endless shops to get anywhere, the labyrinthine spaces... Knowingly or not, Gerry brought them to the best places. Because of course they had been following Gerry again. This time he was going to intercept a suitcase as soon as he stopped playing around. But while they waited for the right suitcase to roll before them, play they did.

“Fine, let me try again.” He switched the weight on his feet while he thought. “I own black lipstick, I keep a switchblade under my pillow and I have a Hawaiian shirt in my closet.”

“Lipstick,” it answered elongating the word all over Gerry’s last truth.

Gerry laughed quietly, more at the way it said the word than at the lie-detection. “You are right, too stupidly expensive. So you _are_ a lie detector by default. Even if that was not the point of being The Big Bad Delusion”.

“It is... a twisted enough conclusion, and untrue.”

“Fine, fine, the other way, then. You tell the lies.”

“You will die, I will die, we will die,” Michael intoned, almost like a nursery rhyme.

“No.” Gerry crossed his arms, not taking his eyes from the baggage carousel (so many confusing things to put in it, so many people scared of being on it...). “You don’t know the future.” One of his arms came up to play with his choker absentmindedly. “And that’s... too broad. When? Tomorrow? Some day? Then it is _obvious_. Twisted, but obvious, because you are not completely alive. You are letting me down here, Michael. Give me something better.”

Michael hummed, not in thought because they knew what to say, but wondering if there would be confusion too if they said...

“I like you, I like you, I like you.”

It was pleased when Gerry didn’t react immediately. Instead, he stared at the carousel without seeing it. Not a twitch, not that confident smile, just a disarray of thought.

“Oookay. And only one is a lie... I... Hmm, I think I can see the point of the delusion thing now.” Michael saw the suitcase Gerry had come to steal, but let it pass by them. This was proper amusement at last. Gerry bent his neck to the right. “Not the lies... but the... doubt?” Gerry looked away from the suitcases and at Michael, and having Gerry’s attention as the confident smile grew back in his face was... amusing, too. Contagious, maybe. Alluring was the word? “Damn,” he said insincerely as if he had actually won something. “Now I will never really know if you like me. I’m heartbroken.”

“What do you want to believe?” Michael tried to instigate the confusion and doubt, because it had been too short-lived. Gerry was just so sure once again.

“Hah! Because the world cares so much about what I want to believe.” Michael let the sarcasm hanging to dry in the silence. “Fine,” Gerry conceded. “I believe... You wouldn’t have played around with the concept if you didn’t want it rattling in my brain, so there is _something,_ but you don’t want to call it liking... maybe.”

“Again you look for sense where there is none. It’s dangerous.”

“Yes, I know; it attracts monsters. One monster at least.”

Michael giggled and looked at the target-suitcase intently, already well away from their reach and soon to be noticed by its original owner. Gerry looked in the same direction and cursed before lounging over other passengers, many suitcases and two bends of the carousel. By then Michael was laughing openly and deepening with it the jet lag of the humans around him. Michael should leave now, let Gerry not find them again today. Yes.

They looked around for a door; it was where it hadn’t been and it was a sad blue.

Attracting monsters was dangerous indeed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short update, but next Sunday there is a long one and it starts like this:  
> "Gerry had not seen Michael in a couple of days (...) Fine, Gerry was worried about the monster."


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: character dismissing someone's request to not use a name. It is situational and not related to anyone's personal beliefs, or gender, but be warned.

Gerry had not seen Michael in a couple of days. It would have been normal if he had been working on hunting down a Leitner of the Spiral, or if it had been planning a way to make Gerry lose his mind, but it didn’t look like that was the case. Gerry was not blind, or colourblind, the opposite was more accurate, and he had seen Michael’s door shifting to a green followed by a desaturated blue. Coupled with the new doormats saying things like “leave” and “Oh, not you again” it didn’t paint a pretty picture.

Fine, Gerry was worried about the monster.

Michael had a door that seemed to be permanently attached to the building opposite from Pine Hurst, even if it never was in the same exact spot. Gerry had seen it early on, but the last days he had almost thought it was gone. Maybe some days it had been really gone, but mostly it was the blue-grey that made it look unfamiliar, unattractive and abandoned. Gerry walked up to it and rose his fist to knock. There were wisps of fog scurrying under the door.

Of course.

He touched his choker with his other hand and made an effort to think about that one time Gertrude had asked if he was fine, about the girl at the music shop, about how happy the charity shop had been when he had brought in a few of his mother’s things, and how they had called to tell him where some of the big lots had gone and... about a much more yellow door taking him from the Forsaken...

The wisps on the floor receded and Gerry knocked. He wondered if this was a trick; after all, here he was, knocking on the door and maybe even willing to go in to check on a monster who wanted to make him lose his mind. He wouldn’t admit it to Michael ever, but maybe the reason he was not spiralled yet was that he had not been too sane from the very start, so after a minute of silence, he tried the doorknob.

It opened on its own a fraction and no more, making him feel unwelcome. Good. It wouldn’t be good if the halls of madness welcomed him. Although he had his doubts about who, or what, he was dealing with.

Inside he found a wide corridor, with bare wooden floors that creaked without being stepped on. There was no light, or at least no light fixtures; he didn’t know why he could see. There were no windows either, and the walls and paintings put him in the mind of an old manor by the beach. Michael would hate it. The Distortion would hate it more.

Gerry had his feet rooted on the street. He knew this was some bullshit from the Lonely and the Spiral at the same time. Infighting was good for humanity, in general, and humans shouldn’t get in the way. It was suicidal, and he had found himself quite attached to his life as of late.

He still cut his roots and stepped inside the deceptively tranquil hall. His steps echoed. The cold got as deep as his bones after a few steps.

“¿Michael?” He shouted at the empty space.

He should have brought something to protect himself probably, but at least he had his lighter, and if he got lost, at least he would commit some arson on his way to get unlost. And since he was on the topic of annoying entities, he lit up a cigarette.

He kept going on a straight line, ignoring turns to both right and left. He didn’t try to open any door.

“¿Michael?” He heard his own echo after a very long while.

So at least there was something left of the Distortion, or the echo wouldn’t do something that stupid. But still, he couldn’t hear nor see anything that would indicate Michael was in there. His hand went to his choker again. Searching by just walking around was a sure way to get killed.

He undid the latch behind his neck and took off the strap. He didn’t know what he was doing, but he hoped being a bit chaotic would take him where he wanted to go. Where did he want to go? He looked up. He had no idea. He looked down. Oh, right, Michael. 

Gerry stared at the eye, thinking hard why he had taken it off, frozen in thought. To clip the inside piece off, of course, that was why. He pushed with his thumb and dislodged the dark shard from the eye frame. He held both. Had there been a point to that, any point at all? Oh, no, no, on the halls pointlessness was the whole point. He was in the halls! No, that wasn't right. He had an empty eye in one hand and a fusiform shard on the other, but he actually had a point, right?

He sat on a nearby chair to think. He stood again and glared at the chair. It looked far more comfortable than it actually was. Oh, deception, right, that was it.

He pocketed the eye frame and took out his cigarette box. With a little help of the burning tip of his cigarette, he crafted out of the plastic strip a way to keep the Spiral shard hanging like a pendulum.

He had no idea why he had done such a useless thing, where...? Where was he? The... Michael’s halls.

He stood and made the mcgiver'd pendant swirl. He didn't remember even deciding to make it, although he remembered the doubt, how it wouldn't work, probably.

It was hanging there, swinging harmlessly as he walked without direction, and when Gerry was about to go past a turn to the right it floated a bit, weakly but odd.

Gerry looked at the corridor. He bit his lip and reconciled himself with the idea that he had no idea what he was doing anyway.

He turned right.

The shard hung lifelessly for a while, then it rolled itself up like a yo-yo. That... Shouldn't happen, right?

He found himself with a door to the right and a corridor to the left. The shard unrolled itself to a normal position when Gerry got it close to the left so he took the door to the right.

He went like that for a while, always to the right when the pendant made a sound, or shone, or got elongated... Until it stayed still, utterly still, no matter how he shoved it, the thing gently fell to the still position and stayed without swaying.

And there was only one door to the left.

He still had no idea why he was there, but curiosity was a strong motivator, and he had a feeling the little shard was along for the ride.

He held it in his fist and opened the door.

There was a person in there.

Correction. There was a person and soon there wouldn't be any "in there" left. The guy- wom- huh? The they was trashing the place. To the point of un-nailing fixtures from the walls with their bare hands, bleeding hands at that.

Gerry stepped forward to maybe try to calm them down, but a crack distracted him. He wouldn't have looked twice at the picture on the floor, behind broken glass, under his boot, but... it had his face, because that was his face, right? A candid picture with his face and the person trashing the place.

Then he found himself shoved against the wall.

“Enough! You can’t keep using lies of him against us!”

And he didn’t think, he just reacted to being pinned to the wall against his will. The person got a knee to the crotch almost instantly. Huh, muscle memory did wonders to one’s foggy mind. Foggy... The fog... What was he doing here again?

There were pictures on the walls. Some showed the person in front of him with a family, some showed them with an old woman kindly embracing them, Gerry knew that wasn’t their grandmother, because that was... And then there were the Escher-like pictures... or... windows?

The person had backed off at the kick, but they didn’t seem to be lost in pain. Their eyes were caught by the pictures. They picked up the picture of Gertrude -Gertrude!- and smashed it against the floor.

“This is NOT!” They shouted at... at the walls? “This is the lie!”

They picked up another frame and another and it all went down.

Gerry felt completely alien from the other person, like they were worlds apart even in close proximity. The idea of leaving didn’t cross his mind; he had something to do. He might have forgotten everything else, but he had something to do, and it was not over yet.

A bone-chilling scream made him look at the fair person again. They were clutching a mirror that wouldn’t budge from the wall. They looked at their face, and then at their hands in horror.

“This was the lie!” They shouted again.

And then all the frames had mirrors.

“No!” They walked like a caged animal. “No! The lie. The lies. I lied to all of them, I wasn’t.”

The person pulled at their hair, clawed at their face, and Gerry jumped to stop them, but... but the face came off? Not like a mask, just like something that had been there but he never realized until it wasn’t. His move made the person notice him for the second time. They had... a face. Of course they had a face, why had he thought they had a chasm of nonsense instead of a face?

“You know. You know I’m not! But you... The most of me wanted you far, and now I’m far, and I’m a me, I’m an I !!! I’m a person!!”.

“...again” his voice said, but... Garry hadn’t said it. Something had said it, and by the look of them, it was a word designed to hurt the one before him. They stumbled back.

“No. Not _again,”_ they spit with distaste. “There was never a me, just a lie, just an _it_.” 

Gerry shut his mouth, unwilling to be anyone’s puppet. He tensed his fists and... he cut himself. He had... he had a thing there, it was a shard with plastic around it. He unpeeled the thing, already distracted, forgetting, focused on the thing.

The person had approached and pressed a finger to the spiral, but Gerry jumped back in surprise. He had the clear image of something like a knife against that same spiral, against his neck, and suddenly the round, normal finger felt completely wrong. Michel should have shar-

“Michael?” Gerry asked, remembering his voice and his echo shouting that name. Was that what he had come for?

The... person? Michael? Was looking at his blunt finger regretfully, but his attention was drawn by his own name.

“Michael! No! Michael is the lie! I’m not Michael, Michael is no. I’m other, I’m the it, the whole... big... more!”

Michael directed its frustration back to the mirrors, to trying to break them fruitlessly. Gerry saw the person turn against their own body with glass shards, because there was broken glass everywhere, and he wasn’t sure if stopping them was the right move. It bled. He bled. IT bled. And sometimes it was red, and sometimes it was noise. It cut its blond curls, and Gerry still didn’t know what to do, but he couldn’t help feeling pain at its pain. He threw himself to the taller... to Michael, to grab it’s wrists and stop the pain.

Unfortunately, he dropped the shard to do so.

Michael fought back, and Gerry didn’t resist. He had no idea why he was fighting this guy, but... he was dizzy. A bar fight? If it was, it no longer mattered, because he had no idea why- Oh, his mother would kill him if he had gotten in a ba- She wouldn’t... Nobody would kill him, right? Because there was nobody left to care, even in a twist- a twisted parody of lo- Where was he?

There was a blond man bleeding in front of him. He was a mess. Had- had this happened during a hunt? They should go to the ER then. The guy was putting long pieces of glass between his fingers, and his shoulders were slowly slumping. He moved his hand across the floor, it looked like a dangerous caress...

“Maybe it is true.”

Gerry didn’t know if he had any right to listen in to that whisper, but he leaned closer.

“Maybe I’m Michael. It could be. Maybe I was just too confused in the Spiral and I forgot.”

The guy fished something from the sea of broken glass, he was pinching something small and black.

“Maybe the Spiral really abandoned me.”

Gerry stood. It made sense. He had probably been hunting a Leitner of the Spiral and this poor guy had gotten too close to get away unscathed. He should go to the ER, both of them should, but he was nobody’s nanny.

“You should go to get those looked at,” he ventured.

Big eyes turned to him.

“You are leaving?” And without missing a beat he whispered, “of course, why would you stay? You don’t know me, and I don’t either, and I’m not... not a part of the whole... just... used up.”

Gerry felt like an asshole, but he had to leave now, before something worse hit, like the Police. He would come back to check up on the guy, but he had to leave before someone got attached and in trouble. He turned to the door and his hand went to his pocket, looking for his keys. Why would he have the keys to that door? Nonsense! But his fingers touched metal and he pulled it out.

It was a choker with an empty eye hanging. The wire frame seemed to have lashes with the shape of a spiral. He didn’t remember making it, but he remembered what he was thinking while he made it. Warmth. Running from the Lonely... The memory slipped.

It didn’t matter, because the interesting part was how through the empty frame he could see a yellow carpet and a black rug. That made no sense. He looked around.

There was a guy he didn’t know, he was quite roughed up. He was in the foetal position around his curled fist. Gerry almost forgot why he had turned, but he looked through the frame at the room, and at the guy. Nothing was what it seemed to be. But what was right?

It felt like the opposite of the correct question and then some.

But... He usually ended up navigating those things by finding the simplest solution and doing the work that was in front of him. He had learned that in a book. And here... there was someone unconscious and hurt, the solution was finding the closest ER, call an ambulance. Simple. He couldn’t be expected to keep the choker on his hand while carrying the guy, and he couldn’t chance being pick-pocketed if the thing was not normal, so he wore it. Simple too. 

He crouched by the guy and found he was not out of it, just terribly weak, so he dragged the guy stumbling out of the room. He had no idea where he had come from, but if this was some hotel he would find a sign, or some exit somewhere, or someone. He had to.

They slumped against a wall for a moment. The guy was tall and heavy and he... he? Sh- Whatever, was exhausted and looking less... less something. He would say less human, but that didn’t mean much nowadays. Maybe he was taking a werewolf to ER.

While they were resting the guy barely moved, but he made a weak gesture to keep Gerry close. Gerry didn’t have it in him to refuse. Things were fucked up in general, clutching to the closest thing alive was reasonable.

And then the guy lifted his arm and pushed against his neck with a finger until something clicked.

Gerry went to check on his own neck, meeting fingers on the way, but yes, the piece was once again in its place. He was confused and he felt the loneliness, but he recognized his choker, he recognized there was Lonely stuff and Spiral stuff going on, and then the guy he was carrying...

“Michael?”

“Mhno,” it managed to say stubbornly.

Gerry didn’t care, it was Michael. He knew it was Michael and he had to get out, at least that one he had gotten right. He had gotten in without a plan to get out, because plans always tended to go to hell in the middle. At least his did. He concentrated on the weight of Michael, strangely congruent for a... a Michael. Unevenly cut curls that were merely dismayed waves fell on his shoulder. They had to get out out out.

He moved them forward. Reason dictated that he should go left for every right turn he had taken, but reason had no business in their path. He should go by...

Michael should decide.

Gerry looked at it.

Michael shouldn’t decide.

Gerry reached yet another intersection and panted with the effort. He could feel _things_ , dangerous things,getting closer; it made him shiver. He didn’t know which of the two interior decorators from hell was after them, or both, or if the Eye was having a fit at losing him for so long.

He thought he could hear steps of boots.

Where to go, where to...

He closed his eyes. If he concentrated he could feel his choker doing stupid things like whispering, or moving, or shining, pulling... To the right. They walked straight, leaving behind turns and doors, and the boards of the floor started to be light yellowish on the sides and dark in the middle. And fuzzy. It was the only sign of the old halls so far, but that was good news. He turned once right, twice in a direction that was made up and once he got so dizzy he thought the headache was the direction.

Michael was turning less human with every step, and normally he would be perfectly fucking happy with that, Michael being Michael, but he was carrying the bastard, and it was not gaining any strength at all. It was just getting more like oily spaghetti and cotton candy in the water. It was hard to grip, hard to carry, too slippery and like its feet were merging with the carpet.

It took Gerry too long to notice, but he was not at his best: They were stuck. The halls ahead didn’t look much more twisted, the ones behind didn’t look any less lonely. Wherever they walked, the Lonely followed. Wherever the Spiral took them, it was not out. Gerry groaned in frustration, Michael didn’t even react. He decided to add another one to the pile of bad decisions:

“Look, you two! Now I'm going to _leave_ , and I’d better not leave angry! Because once I get out, and I WILL, I will delight in ripping very small pieces of your Leitners for months. Lukas, I’ll send groups of happy squatters with urban gardens to your most remote hideouts, and to the Distortion, you’d better let me leave from here with Michael, because if you don’t-”

A greenish door slammed open violently not very far ahead. There was a crimson ray of the evening sun coming through it. Gerry grumbled. He couldn’t let them know it was the most beautiful thing he had seen in days. He didn’t mind the fog in their way; Gerry stomped on it. The few yards felt like miles, and a pull made him stop to put Michael somewhat comfortably over his shoulders again but... Someone was pulling back.

Turns out fear gets different reactions out of people; some fly, some fight and some freeze. Gerry had curated the second one for years. Despite the quick reaction, the fist didn’t connect. Gerry didn’t know the guy, but he looked as bland as he thought any Lukas would, and he was still grabbing Michael’s arm.

Gerry threw a kick that graced him on the hip and dislodged the grip. He pulled Michael to the door tripping on mist that shouldn’t be that solid. The guy was faster, but Gerry was not willing to leave Michael. He was closing in, without a real expression on his face, emotionless, and Gerry readied another punch that he knew wouldn’t be enough.

The guy’s mug got a quick introduction to a door that had opened from the ceiling, and when he stepped back he stumbled on the gap of an open door on the floor that may or may not have been the same one from the ceiling. 

Gerry didn’t wait to question his luck, he ran with Michael outside and squinted at the sun. Ahead of him was Pine Hurst and somewhere in the city was ER. It was not even worth considering his options. He walked straight ahead and pushed the door open. Michael whined as soon as they crossed the wards, but it was necessary, because then Gerry abandoned him on the floor by the door to nullify the wards of the Spiral. He wasn’t going to let Michael all _alone_ at the doorstep for any random old-money scumbag to take him away while he turned off the fear-repellent. Not after just getting him back from that shit-show.

He dragged Michael to the sofa and decided that eldritch avatars could heal on their own while he tended to his own wounds. He wouldn’t be of any help if his cuts got infected. Cleaning his wounds turned to a shower, which ran for longer than necessary, but he wasn’t keen on getting out and facing the facts.

Namely:

He had done yet another stupid thing.

He had probably made yet another enemy he didn’t need.

There was a piece of the Spiral passed out on his sofa.

He didn’t know how to nurse a monster back to health.

He had no idea why he had done any of it.

Maybe he had become something like territorial too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And this is all I have fleshed out so far. I have pieces and ideas, but not organized, and I won't have free time anytime soon. Analogic life takes time, all that precious time, plenty of time, to do it right...  
> But read my other things meanwhile! I have more Magnus fics and I have original works that should keep you entertained for a while. I'm dropping a [link.](https://docs.google.com/document/d/13WVEUffWTDU7MMYo2IjZRn38kB6j8k32xKJaPpz7uOY/edit?usp=sharing)


	11. Chapter 11

Gerry treated the parts of Michael that had stayed vaguely human as he would treat a human. Michael shouldn’t be human at all, treating it as such shouldn’t be a thing, but he had cleaned wounds that bled what no one would call blood. He had put ice on the bruises he had put there and fretted with hate at the fingerprints on the arm that the _Lukas_ had put there.

And then nothing.

He had no idea what else to do except keep fretting at the pile of chaos that had crashed on his sofa. No, not fretting, just... He was just a reasonable amount of worried. He looked outside his windows every few hours, and the door was there, with the same bluish-gray tone and looking no better than Michael.

He sighed a lot during the next hours, because he knew this one wouldn’t just cure itself and he didn’t know what to do about it. The fog was laying siege to Pine Hurst again, to make things just perfect.

Inaction had never been Gerry’s strong point. Not even when he had no idea of what to do. That was where all the scars came from, and more would come, he was sure.

Gerry looked at Michael, almost even breathing. Breathing and Michael didn’t mix well, breathing was something unsettling it did after laughing at you for a while, and never rhythmic.

In the outskirts of his mind was the question “why am I even bothering?”, but it was only running in circles and never actually entering his mind. It was convenient, because he wouldn’t have listened if it did. There were things to do first, no idea what, just things.

***

The first time Michael blinked, the world sunk on itself, plastered to the floor. There was fear in the air, the wrong kind, but fear. The... the Terminus maybe. It was... out of its grasp. Fear floated above and Michael was stuck to the floor. Then just the dancing patterns behind rubbed eyelids.

The second time their eyes opened he saw a ceiling, they also saw the smell of the number four, but mostly he saw a voice saying things that didn’t make any sense. They understood the language, but the meaning got lost in the way. And then it drifted away.

The third time it felt disgustingly human. Michael looked around. On the table there were dices of every kind spread over pictures of optical illusions that covered the posters of fractals underneath. An open copy of the Voynich manuscript topped it off. Next to its head it saw a few piles of books. Alice in Wonderland had its spine facing its way, the other titles it could read were anthologies of dadaist poetry and Freud.

At its feet there was a canvas with abstract art still wet and on the floor he saw old-fashioned 3D paper glasses. There were mazes hand-drawn also spread on the floor; with a glance he recognized they were unsolvable. And then all kind of random things like a cup of tea with apparently motor oil in it and an old kiwi slice on the rim. There were pencil shavings with numbers written on them. Many doorknobs were spread on the floor. There was an armchair close-by with a long pillow hanging from one side and a blanket wrinkled on the other armrest.

There were things that Michael recognized sprinkled over the room; Artifacts of the Spiral. Those ones still had the brown paper tag of the Institute hanging from them, so Gerry must have stolen them from Storage.

There were spirals positively everywhere, and springs, and a card deck, and a rigged card deck, and a light bulb and a keyboard’s key of the letter Y and a rubber pencil and a tangled cat’s cradle and pages and pages with automatic writing and so much more... Any of those things would have been dangerous had Michael been all-there when they arrived, but...

Michael only noticed the voice again when it stopped with a gasp, then the clap of a book closing, and finally Michael could focus on Gerry.

“Fucking YES, you are awake.” Gerry was standing frozen by the window, and Michael could barely see a shadow. Existing was hard... then again, it shouldn’t be existing.

“I didn’t know I could sleep,” it let its eyes wander through the assorted items. Two toy trucks, a kazoo, enough keys to double as weights...

“You can’t, that was a fucking coma, trust me.” A drinking horn full of pine cones, a fan, coins...

“I’m not human enough to be in a coma.” An eight ball, coffee beans...

“Then be in a semicolon for all I care.” 

His words had less bite than usual and it showed; Gerry stepped over piles of the quasi diogenic trash and sat down on the armchair, letting air out in what was more a deflating than a sigh. Michael thought for a moment how uncomfortable that armchair would be, before it realized it was not in the hallways.

It was in Pine Hurst. It was _in_ Pine Hurst.

Michael picked an orange peel, perfectly spring-like and with disorienting linear doodles on it.

“Is this a shrine?”

Gerry looked around with some sweet confusion, and as soon as the words registered he consciously cut the feeling.

“No, it is not... Not intentionally, at least.” 

“Unintended; the best kind.” 

“Don’t start that with me, I’ll throw you out.”

Michael saw relief in all of his gestures. In the way he went from sitting at the edge of the seat to letting the pillows eat him. Gerry had closed his eyes, hard, like someone feeling an impending migraine, or someone who hadn’t been sleeping for days. Probably both were true.

“But you did this.”

“What DIDN’t I do?” He threw his hands in the air. “I tried everything I could. I downloaded all the random noises I could, and played them at random too, and some of them backwards. I read so many strange things I think my tongue went numb. I found riddles and changed them to make them unsolvable, I stole Spiral statements, and not Gertrude nor the Eye were happy with that, although I think both were happy that the other wasn’t, and now I have a whole playlist with the most obscure lyrics I could think of that I played and then the...” Gerry’s mind wandered off to some memory before it came back with a wince. “I’m _so_ glad you didn’t wake up for that one.”

Gerry went silent and Michael tried to at least sit up, but nothing was responding right. Frequently, its body was at best a wish of a perception pulled together by a ribbon. Now it felt like the ribbon had been transformed into lead restraints all over, and like it wasn’t there to hold anything at the same time. Such was the way of human bodies. Again, it felt disgustingly human.

Michael wasn’t an expert on the Distortion, nobody could be, but it was the closest it got. Nothing was right or wrongly right. Not yet. And the pick and mix of trinkets, however powerful, were not what had brought it back to at least being somewhat wrong. Michael gave up trying to move for now. A clock somewhere where Michael couldn’t see was ticking unevenly.

“I still had options,” Gerry continued after a while, but so low that Michael wasn’t sure if he was sleep-talking. “but I was _this_ close to tracking down your statement givers and bringing them here, and then... I don’t know, making them read a fucking Leitner or something. I was seriously close to doing something I couldn’t get back from.”

...And that had frightened Gerry. Michael could see it in his vacant but awake stare, and in the defeated slump of his shoulders, in the bags under his eyes, and in the way the sleep deprivation had revealed for him far more than what he ever would have. He had been afraid of losing his mind, and _that_ had been the catalyst all the trinkets needed.

Michael turned to face Gerry fully and wondered: A truth, a lie, an omission... Hard choice, but most of all, it wished it had been awake to see Gerry’s fear, however brief. So an omission, in case it could happen again.

“I hear there are ways to wake-”

“You will have to forever wonder if I tried the sleeping beauty method.” Gerry seemed to come back and pull himself from his mood. He put his elbow on the armrest and his face in his hand. He was still crashing, all the accumulated not-sleep piling up on him. All his strength seemed to go directly to an overconfident smile. 

“...No... I won’t...” Michael was envious of that smile, without good reason.

“No?” Gerry mumbled. Michael had preyed before on the sleepless; Gerry could be made to stay awake some more, until he cracked. And Michael could use that, maybe, to exist more like itself again.

“Once you refused one to seal a deal. You wouldn’t, for this.”

“Keep thinking that,” Gerry infused the reply with so much sarcasm that even Michael doubted.

“I... don’t need to.”

“Oh, now you Know, do you?” Gerry huffed a little in amusement.

“A wake-up kiss is... commonplace.”

“So?” He said barely in a tired humm.

“You are... anything but commonplace. You are... Curiously unexpected, not without your own logic. A paradox!”

Gerry blinked slowly, Michael suspected he would not remember much once he’d wake up, if he woke up.

“And... you knew me enough to avoid the commonplace...”

Making an effort Michael held a (thankfully) long and sharp hand that encompassed the... Yes, it was an impromptu and involuntary shrine. “No kiss.”

Silence. Gerry squirmed for a moment, but he was not one to be reduced so easily.

“Hold on.” He made to stand up. “You are making sense, I’ll get the dictionary to read words at random.” But he didn’t.

Michael saw him slump slightly, and instead of nudging Gerry awake, it waited until Gerry rambled to fill the silence.

“It is not that I know you, or that I Know you for that matter. You can’t be known, isn’t that the whole point?” And Gerry seemed to go deeper into himself while being present. “And if avoiding the commonplace becomes the new normal, doing it becomes the oddity, so it is not like knowing helps at all.” And getting the words out of his thoughts seemed to be harder and slower. “I just did.” 

Michael let Gerry drift to sleep. Because Michael could control himself just enough to not cut his only source of fear for now. Through the window the angle was not good, but it could see a corner of a greenish door through a white fog.

This was far from over.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Life is hectic still. I'll answer comments once I get some time,   
> lots of love! Stay safe and wear your facemasks!


	12. Chapter 12

His relationship with sleep had been tenuous at best throughout his life. Gerry had slept with an eye open since the night his father disappeared, and from then on, many would argue that he didn’t so much sleep as fall unconscious. But he did try when he has the chance.

The last weeks he had been too focused trying to wake Michael to sleep, so he had been surviving on catnaps. Why was he then laying in bed, eyes feeling heavy and sandy, glaring at the ceiling and completely awake? One might think it was because of the door opening and closing constantly downstairs. One would be right.

But of course, sleep was not a thing anymore in the Pine Hurst household; insomnia came with the Spiral territory. Gerry knew it was, he knew it helped Michael even if it wasn’t enough to put him to rights. All the inconveniences, none of the benefits; he familiar with all of it. Still. The noise was annoying.

Gerry stood up and walked out. He paid with the stairs the bad humour of the last sleepless nights accumulated, but his lack of boots made it a quiet affair compared to the maddening door opening and closing. 

Right from the last step, Gerry caught Michael in the act. Every time he opened the kitchen door, his face took a surprised frown as if he expected there to be something else. It was the saddest thing Gerry had seen since the last time he looked into a mirror. And the most annoying, because he craved a good night sleep and he wasn’t above begging if pull came to shove.

“This is not over, is it?” Garry said walking to the door and almost getting a face full of wood.

Almost. It stopped an inch before hitting. Michael crept from behind it slowly.

“Not at all.” He looked at the ground and played with the latch. “The Lukas have made themselves at home in the halls.”

Gerry squeezed through the gap. “Do you have any idea of how this happened?”

Michael let go of the doorknob at least. They walked away, crossed their arms, walked back. Gerry made a beeline for a table to sit on. It was either too early or too late to be awake and standing.

“They split us apart,” Michael explained. “The Distortion and I have had disagreements in the past, but it was never more than a conversation with oneself, but... I think they found... us.”

“They found you?”

“No, they found US. They found two. Two of us. They found me, and they found a... a way to make me us.”

“You are almost at acceptable levels of not making sense,” Gerry mumbled.

Michael decided explanations were something to be done from a close distance. He propped himself next to Gerry and extended a hand.

“I can’t be lonely the way a human can. But they could split the part of me that was closest to being human and find a gap for loneliness in me missing.... me.”

“Logic... Not.” Gerry blinked owlishly. He needed some shut-eye. He was well-past sleepy, tired was a speck in the horizon next to exhaustion. No, what he was, was _done._ “Wait. No, it does make sense, when I found you, you almost thought you were a human...”

“If I was confused enough to think I was human, loneliness had an edge.” Michael nodded.

“And... what are we going to do about it?”

There was a moment of silence, only disturbed by the uneven tick-tock of the clock in the living room. Gerry picked at a loose paper towel he was half-sitting on.

“We?” Michael finally asked.

“ _We._ This concerns me too.” He looked at Michael unwavering. “I think I know why you are in the shit-list of the evil Santa Claus and his edible family.” 

“Edible? Not even _I_ could stomach a Lukas.”

“Yes, but you are under my roof and in this house we eat the rich... I know you got in trouble with them because you took me from them... Also... Thank you.” Gerry finally looked away, but his kitchen was quite boring. Michael was the most interesting thing he had in there. That and the gasoline in the cupboard, of course.

“We,” Michael repeated.

“We.” Gerry nodded once firmly.

Michael smiled but didn’t say anything else. Gerry let the silence take root. They had been so nervous, so tired, so out of it, that any of their interactions had been a necessity. Gerry had missed having Michael close without it being part of some mission, just for the sake of it. And their fragile silence was almost exactly what he had missed.

Gerry, in a fit of sleep-deprived inspiration, offered his hand. Michael looked at it curiously, and after frowning a moment offered his own to be taken. Gerry huffed a laugh and compromised, playing with the five-fingered death-trap. At least that was back to normal most of the time.

“What?”

“ _We_ , I guess.” 

Michael let him play around. They were clearly thinking, but the thoughts of a part of the distortion were not expected to be linear. Gerry stopped Michael at random.

“What’s in your mind now?”

“I think... I’m... We are... it.”

“You lost me, again.”

“I’m not Michael, I’m the Distortion, I’m a lie, but I can’t be Michael, because Michael is just, this.”

“Go on, finish the thought, I may get there eventually.”

“I’m not a who. I’m only one, I’m an _it._ I can’t be _split,_ because even apart, I’m it.”

“ _Oh_ you are... yes, you already mentioned before.”

“Yes, but more, I thought of us as two sometimes, it made things... less me, but more... stable. But I must be, me, all of me, one, it, and there should be no space for the lonely again. I’m not he and it, I’m not parts, I’m just it.”

“I think I get it. Thinking of you as _it,_ and as _one_.”

“Exactly.”

Both of them chewed on it for a moment.

“Honestly?” Gerry shrugged. “It may be less confusing. I was thinking of you all over the place anyway.”

“Indeed?” Michael smiled just on the wrong side of too wide.

“PRONOUNS! Thinking all kind of _pronouns_!” Gerry rushed to mock-rectify.

Michael laughed, and Gerry squeezed Michael’s hand, still in his own. He realized he didn’t need to be defensive. It was simply more fun to keep pretending. Going by Michael’s sly look, it knew it too. 

“ _It_. It’s a start. It's not a plan, but it is not nothing. Now the real issue is... Will you let me sleep already?!”

Michael only laughed louder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short but sweet, I hope.


	13. Chapter 13

Gerry finally got around to putting the books back on the shelves from the _not-shrine_. He rather liked those fuckers when they weren’t evil made pulp. The dadaist collection and Alice went back to the office shelves. Alice was closest to his art books; one stolen, the rest fairly new. The Dadaist collection was shelved closer to the philosophy stuff, a few things about science, and Mary's huge collection about parasciences. He’d have to sell most of those. Sciences and parasciences... Sciences...  
  
Gerry recognized the beginning of an idea taking shape while he stared at the collection. It was such a bad idea. He couldn't entertain it for long because he had things to do, but just the thought of a new possibility was enough to keep some hope. His few hours of sleep had done him heaps of good if he was already thinking about new ideas and coherent enough to not just jump to act on them. He could take his ideas for a walk, think them through, maybe even consult with someone... Yes, he should air his concerns. Despite the situation, Gerry still had things to do outside of Pine Hurst. Michael was under siege, not Gerry this time, but whenever he went out the sickly-looking door kept appearing in inconspicuous corners. He had tested the waters and surmised it didn’t call to him the way a proper distortion door did. He was pretty sure the Lonely-Distortion mix had broken both of them, at least for Gerry.

Once he had proven _that_ theory, he had a second idea to test.

He wandered to a discrete dead end where shops showed their ugly backstage and sure enough, there was a sick door waiting for him. He kicked the “Goodbye!” doormat away, left his grocery bags on the ground and sat on the small step in front of the door. He rested his back against the wood and the hairs on his nape stood, it seemed to be leeching heat from him. He didn’t pay any attention to the cold coming from the surface.

Gerry fished out a packet of cigarettes and a lighter from his pocket. He was keenly aware of every noise, every feeling that could mark the start of a frantic race away. Nothing. Maybe a faint echo, maybe steps far away, maybe creaks, but nothing too alarming with the bustling noise of life in the main street just a few steps away.

He took a drag and started to speak.

“So... Apparently, I left you home, but here you are.” He let the back of his head rest against the door. He wasn’t exactly relaxed, but it was his best pantomime to look the part. “Hmpf, of course, according to _you..._ Maybe expecting anything but lies is an exercise in futility with you, don’t you think?”

There was no response.

“You know what? I don’t think you and Michael are _one_. I think it is worse, I think you are one _and_ many. At the same time. I read about that kind of thing in some religions. And of course, I can’t forget: definition should elude you by nature, so you are not even that.” Gerry sighed. “Knock twice if I’m wrong.”

There was no reaction, not that he really expected one. Still, he turned his head to glare sideways at the door. 

“Can you even hear me? Can you even hear me if Michael is... This could get confusing. Can you hear me if you are back in Pine Hurst? Is it like leaving your ears in the other coat?”

Gerry exhaled downward, and with his face tilted to the side to peek at the door, the smoke got close enough to the slit on the floor. Gerry saw the smoke getting sucked in and out a little. It could be a gust of wind, but he fancied it a breathing. A useless breathing in the case of a door monster, so it was probably by design. Good. He chose to believe the Distortion was there listening and subtly trying to scare.

“I don’t like you. Or, I guess I don’t like this side of you. The one that hunts humans for... nothing. Survival, I guess. But I’m not too sure of that. Whatever the reason, you hurt people. You make them vanish. I could turn a blind eye if you...” For a moment Gerry realized he was confiding in a door and doubted his sanity. Good. He pushed on. “What? Don’t exist plainly at me like that, _I could_. I could turn a blind eye if you just scared people. It is your thing, right? Fear. People like fear sometimes. Fear is useful some days. People are incredibly resilient, they come back from unimaginable pain and fear but... But you insist on making people miserable to the breaking point. And if there is something I never understood about all this mystic, stupid, personal ecosystem of yours, it’s that. Why does it have to be the kind of fear that hurts forever?”

He extended his arm over the doormat, still close enough to be a handy ashtray. 

“Am I missing _something_? Are there any fear-things who set up a house of horrors and are living peacefully? Is there someone out there writing scary books, feeding off his readers, and living an almost normal life?”

Gerry looked away at the street, full of prospective victims.

“Could Michael turn you... turn itself, _yourself_ that way? Because if this is just an aspect of you...”

Gerry’s thoughts went back to Pine Hurst and to the fear piece that had become a fixture at home. Gerry would probably go back home to find shredded curtains. He couldn’t help the image of a wild gremlin crossed with a muppet in the body of a blond beanpole and he smiled to himself. It was good that the Distortion couldn’t Know his thoughts or there would be retribution.

Gerry thought back on the night when he had said he wanted to sleep. Michael had only laughed, and Gerry had thought it meant something like “no”. It had _implied_ that Gerry should give in to insomnia, but then Gerry had managed to fall prey to exhaustion for hours... Michael had not moved from the corner where its influence didn’t reach him... Gerry couldn’t forget that detail. It meant something important. He didn't know what exactly, but he'd find out eventually. 

“Michael..." He said to the door. "I get on with it. It is a good... whatever. A good part of you. Do you hear me? And if you ruin it for... us, us as in _you are included, I guess_ , it would be the worst thing to happen to you since Gertrude. That’s a warning, not even a threat.

“And... I’ve been figuring out a few theories. Hypothesis more like, if we are being pedantic. I think I know how to kick the Lukases out.” He took a deep breath, but didn’t even bother to turn before shouting. “CAN YOU HEAR ME, LUKAS LOT? I HAVE A PLAN NOW! EVACUATE OR ELSE!”

He waited, but he couldn’t hear a thing. He grunted for himself. 

“Anyway, there are things that I could do. To help you throw them out. But... I have to consider the consequences. It is not an easy choice. Then again, when have you ever made anything easy for me, huh?” Gerry’s voice was not entirely devoid of some fondness. It was also absolutely not fond

He stumped the cigarette on the floor. He had the distinct feeling of the door communicating back “ _And when have you?_ ” But could be hallucinating, he could be being influenced, he could be making it up to deny he was actually monologuing at an evil door. Maybe his idea would work, maybe it was his worst idea to date. Maybe nothing would work, maybe it would become his downfall. 

He thought he heard steps, getting closer. Maybe it was nothing.

He stood. He had not survived this long by staying around to find out if _maybes_ were actually _nothings._

“If any part of you remembers any part of this conversation once we solve this mass, I will deny it ever happened, and since you are made of lies you won’t even know if your mind lies to you. Mark my words.”

He wasn't deterred by the lack of answer and he didn't look back. On his way to Pine Hurst he passed by a hardware store and made a quick stop. It was an impulsive purchase and not part of a plan, but there were things that he couldn't pass up. 

Later on, he cheerfully slammed the front door of Pine Hurst and shouted from the entrance.

“You are a terrific listener!”

“I’m a what?” Michael poked his head from, of course, a door, but a plain door. 

“Only marginally better conversationalist than talking to a brick wall, but a good listener at least.”

Michael felt a snap of its own confusion, each nonsense crunchy like uncooked pasta after starving for months.

“I am?”

“You are.”

“Yes...”

“Glad we agree.”

Michael saw Gerry putting groceries in the refrigerator. He wouldn't ask, because he was not a creature of questions, but he had an excess of curiosity that the Spiral never liked. The last plastic bag Gerry took away. He walked right back through the main door and Michael looked through the spyhole. Gerry stood in front of the lonely-touched piece of Spiral, and took a tin can and a brush from the bag. Gerry put the brush on the door and Michael felt cold, maybe like nail polish, except he had no frame reference for that. He also felt faint, and there was a lurch at his throat. If Gerry painted an eye, mixed up with the lonely and with the weakened Spiral... But... Gerry didn't seem to be painting an eye.

E V I

Michael couldn't read more because Gerry's shoulder was blocking the view. A pedestrian walked slower, almost coming to a stop next to Gerry. They must have said something, because Gerry flipped them off. The person walked away briskly, Gerry never stopped painting. Finally, Gerry moved aside enough to read the whole thing.

“Eviction notice. Lukas out.”

Gerry walked back with a big smile. Behind him, Michael saw the words vanish, eaten up by the wood. Gerry opened the door, and he was all badly hidden grins.

He closed the door. “Normally I wouldn’t stand for evictions.” He walked to the living room. “But you have to speak their language, I guess.” He looked out, to the sick door. “Aww, It didn’t work anyway, it is gone.”

“It worked a little,” Michael explained.

“But it is _gone_.” Gerry crossed his arms, starring daggers at the door.

“It is still written,” Michael insisted. “But on the inside.”

“On the- Is it?” Gerry turned to look at Michael with a smile. His voice got tinted a shade crueller. It was... an interesting tone. “How do you know?”

“Because it worked. I’m a bit more me. I feel it. And it is showing. On the inside. Of. Every. Door.”

They looked out. Maybe they were imagining things, but the paint job looked a bit more saturated.

“Good! It is not why I did it, but good! Do you think we can do something to drive them out on purpose this time?”

“On purpose... Purpose slips off me, like water off a duck.”

“Liar.”

Gerry went back to the shelves that night... sciences. He was sure there was that one book... It had pictures and lacked any lethal ex libris. He had a good eye for books, so he found it quickly. On a whim he took the book about nihilism from the opposite shelf too. It was not the kind of reading material most people took to bed, but he had much to think about.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another short one. Want to guess what Gerry is playing at?


	14. Chapter 14

“Fine!” 

Michael heard the shout come from the shower. 

“Fine, fine, fine!”

It could hear the word, quieter as it got closer. The shout had been reduced to barely a mumble when it reached the door. It was going to knock, it was, but then the door opened and it was face to face with a Gerry preparing to shout. 

“Oh,” he said instead. “You are... here?”

Michael hummed distractedly. Gerry was always ready to bolt; he would never be caught wearing a towel. That was why he was already dressed... except for how he _was_ wearing a towel... in his hair. Michael’s eyes were glued to the way it twisted over him, and his hair... Gerry’s hair had to be _inside,_ all carefully curled and twisted...

“Michael?”

“Gerry.” It looked back into Gerry’s eyes, which were narrowed. 

“I was about to call you anyway.”

He slipped by its side, rushed into his bedroom and came back out with a book. Not even a Leitner, or one from the improvised shrine. It was, by any account, just a book. Quite new, with a drawing of the atomic model on the cover. 

Gerry stopped in the middle of the hallway, book in hand, looked at Michael, averted his eyes and cradled the book closer to his chest. 

“Let’s go to the living room.”

Michael followed, still distracted by the towel and the one wearing it, although it was harder to find it focused than distracted on any given day. 

The book made a thud noise when it was thrown face down on the table. Michael reached for the tome and since Gerry didn’t stop it, flickered through the pages. Some were bookmarked with pieces of paper, but it was a textbook. Plain and simple. That didn’t explain why Gerry was pacing, throwing dirty looks at the window, pacing back, throwing dirty looks at the book...

“I had an idea.”

Michael didn’t move. He didn’t want to break Gerry’s resolution, which felt fragile and brittle today. 

“But it is not a good idea.”

Gerry sat in an armchair and took off the towel. For a moment his hair unwinded, but Gerry didn’t. Gerry was growing tenser instead. Michael slid the tome in his direction, hoping to get a reaction at least. Gerry eyed it intensely. 

“It is _such_ a bad idea.”

“What is?”

“I’m not some naif, unknowing bystander. I’m perfectly aware that helping you to stand back up again implies dooming some poor idiot in the future.”

Michael knew the argument. It had seen it floating in Gerry’s thoughts frequently. This was not new, but apparently, now it was more poignant. 

“Can you choose your victims? Can... you... find less...?” Gerry drifted off and when he came back he wasn’t talking to Michael. “No. Of course not. _Those are questions._ Is that what you were going to say? And even if you could choose, who deserves...? And I can’t trust you to choose or to even tell me the truth, I shouldn’t, and that can only end in chaos and pain.”

Michael could see the frown on Gerry’s face grow.

“I can’t be part of that. I don’t want to. I’m not... I’m not some clichéd hero to blame myself for something when it is _your_ victims, when it is _you_ , and _your_ choices. Even if... It is not a choice, is it? But you have never tried another way or have you?”

Gerry gasped when he turned and Michael was only a couple of inches from his face, sporting a frown of his own. Gerry lost his track of mind completely. 

“Michael? What’s wrong?”

Gerry leaned back, if only to see its whole... face. It was less congruent than in the last few days.

“You are confused,” it said. Gerry waited; Michael was slow and stilted when it came down to truths; he had learnt that much at least. “I like it.”

“Oh.” Gerry finally understood the frown. Michael didn’t like _liking_ it. But it was helping it recover, hence the less congruent face. “Come here, idiot.” He reached and pulled Michael’s hips, manhandling it until it was sitting by his side in the too-small armchair. It was half on his lap and half on the cushion. “I don’t mind as long as you don’t make it worse.”

Michael laughed a mirthless huff and Gerry pressed them closer with an arm around its shoulders. There was fear in the air, doubtlessly, now it was evident, but he wasn’t sure if it was only his. Michael was splitting, even in its almost-human state. It was both big and looming and just small enough to be held and hide in his arms. Neither version was looking at Gerry. Feeding off one's own doubts and fear couldn't be healthy. 

But what else was there? Gerry knew there was no choice. He could let the Lonely keep a part of the Distortion, stay this way, and that would be a disaster too. With the extra slice of Distortion maybe they would feel emboldened to attempt a ritual... And the other powers had stayed away for now, but if others picked sides it would get ugly and the Eye was the first in line what with Gerry, Michael and the Lukas all having connections to the Institute. _Infighting_ was good for humanity; _wars_ were just the opposite. And if Gertrude got a whiff of what was going on at Pine Hurst she would blow the whole street... and everything would start anew. She would probably blow Gerry up too for good measure.

And, no, there was no choice. He could fool himself into thinking it was a rational decision to level the playground, but he couldn’t deny he had part of the Distortion basically cuddling with him. He had already helped it before. No, it was not a choice, it was his conscience torturing him for having chosen already, and his choice was one that shouldn't have crossed his mind. 

“You told me,” he started murmuring into to what could be a shoulder, or curls, or cloth, who knew. “How figuring out that life was meaningless and unstructured gave you a foothold to come back, is that right?”

Michael let out a sigh. Gerry guessed the fear feast was over since he had made his decision. 

“Well, there is this feeling, when you are reading about science, when you stumble across a concept that... Right, is just a- A thought- The-”

“You don’t want to speak,” Michael stated into his clavicle, with a lazy laugh overlapping. Gerry realized he had missed the whole strangeness of that laugh. 

“I want to speak as much as I want to rip out my nails.” 

Michael emerged to scrutinize his face and Gerry pulled the side of his mouth in a tired grimace, daring it to comment. Michael didn’t. It looked at the book on the table questioning. Gerry looked at the book and laughed. Everything was so stupid. 

“I don’t even know if you... Maybe all this stupid guilt is for nothing. Maybe you already know and... Michael, have you used science in your lies?” Michael tilted its head. “The uncertainty principle?” Michael’s curls did strange things when it denied it. “Does non-Euclidian ring any...? No? Oh, well, it was not like me to luck out of this one. Can’t blame a guy for trying.”

Gerry breathed deeply. 

“Right. There are quite a lot of things we could use to give you a boost against the Lukas’, but there was one in particular I thought would suit you. It is a scientific concept that many people believe without fully understanding it. Even the ones who understand it have doubts about how to apply it... And... and then there is a whole chapter about string theory too... And just the existence of one-dimensional things is enough to give you an edge over... practically everyone...”

Gerry was losing track of his thoughts. He blamed Michael, but it was such a wide topic, and the more he thought about it... There was so much confusion to be extracted from pop culture... And who would suffer for it? He hoped for stupid entitled scholars who thought a higher education made them better than everyone, or click-bait journalists, but a student cracking under the pressure of stress was far more likely.

"You see, nihilism is fine enough, but you know what's even better? Schrodinger. Put a cat with poisoned sardines inside a box. Every outcome is possible until it is known, and that sounds like something up your lane, doesn’t it? There is everything behind a door before you open it, right? But with you… there is everything once you open it too.” Gerry realized he had no idea how to explain what he was actually thinking. “Schrodinger’s box, but the box is made of crystal, and it is a door. And when you open it, it stays Schrodinger, the cat is not dead or alive, it stays... _Schrodingerified_ , it stays distorted, it stays in a state of permanent everything. And the point, the point...” Gerry felt like a drunk giving directions in a town he didn’t know. “The point is you can say it is science! No matter how illogical, oversimplistic, or harmful it is objectively, you have to believe it because that is how pop-science works! And for the Spiral that means...” 

He couldn’t quite get across the idea of trying to re-frame your world when you were told something existed in just one dimension. He searched Michael’s eyes and found an intent stare and an intense smile. He realized Michael had let him ramble on purpose. 

“Of course the cat dies in all outcomes if you let it stay in the box for long enough.” He looked away. Not a nice thought, maybe, but a grounding one in the face of the pool of Distortion he was diving under. “You will have to read the book for more. I did my part.”

As close as they were, Gerry could spot Michael had a healthy stroboscopic colour to his cheeks. Good, if just the prospective confusion was already helping, reaching for more would definitely plunge into confusion any new prey. Michael didn’t move, but it reached for the book and seemed to at least read the titles this time. It wasn’t a good book, it crammed physics and biology and history in one neat paper tome, ready to sell the illusion of knowledge to those in a rush to look clever. It was full of metaphors that didn’t work, outdated theories and half-truths... which made it perfect for Michael.

“Why do you know all of this?” 

Gerry shrugged. “I had a brief affair with technical drawing and optical illusions. I was researching references to draw a Klein bottle and got sidetracked.” Very sidetracked. He had jumped from reference to reference and never got around to drawing the damned bottle. 

“That’s very beholder of you.”

“Then consider it an Eye-Spiral truce and leave me out of the equation. I don’t care, it would make me feel less guilty at least.” 

A shredding noise came from the book. “It is working.” Its hands were rounded for the moment, but the cut was straight and ended at the tip of its finger, and if he tilted his head just right, the cut was simply not there.

“Oh.” Gerry didn’t seem happy, his face had closed off. “Good.” But it didn’t feel like it. 

Neither of them moved and Gerry took to reading aloud the paragraphs he had highlighted the previous nights, and explained the ways he thought it could be twisted. He knew what he was doing, but at the same time, he had no idea what he was doing. What was worse; he didn’t know what kind of consequences would come to bite him in the arse. And... he couldn’t be bothered to consider them at the moment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a thing against misleading pop science, and I guess it shows.  
> Also, reading aloud is a love language that will have to be pried from my coffin.  
> I didn't mean to give Michael a sort of kink with the hair in the towel, but here we are, with our choices. >:)


End file.
